Wednesday Bible Study: Pot pourri and lex talionis

As I ' ve noted before, the division into chapters and verses was made by medieval monks, and isn ' t always logical. (They may have been getting into the sacramental wine.) Leviticus 24 consists of three obviously distinct parts, two of which might have originally gone together as specifications of ritual but the third of which is unrelated. Furthermore, the whole thing is an interpolation between the schedule of festivals in 23 and the schedule of jubilees in 25. Leviticus generally is haphazardly organized. It seems the priests didn ' t really care about narrative or logical coherence, they just wanted to get everything in there. As I ' ve said, it seems more like a filing cabinet than a constructed document. In any event, the third section is very important in the history of moral thought and remains influential, for better or, in my opinion, for worse, among some people.24 TheLord spoke to Moses, saying:2 Command the people of Israel to bring you pure oil of beaten olives for the lamp, that a light may be kept burning regularly.3 Aaron shall set it up in the tent of meeting, outside the curtain of the covenant,[a] to burn from evening to morning before theLord regularly; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations.4 He shall set up the lamps on the lampstand of pure gold[b] before theLord regularly.Just another reminder of the fictitious setting. They ' re camping out in the desert, subsisting on manna. They cannot possibly have had a co...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs