Thoughts on Leviticus 21

Today’s reading: Leviticus 21; Mark 2

Leviticus 21 doesn’t sit well with me. Intellectually, I get it, and I don’t take issue with it, but it honestly takes a bit of an act of will to think about it properly.

As the rules for the priesthood are being laid out, it very quickly feels exclusive or elitist. In one sense, it’s already exclusive in that it is only available to Aaron’s descendants, but even among them, God excludes any with a physical deformity, disability, chronic illness, etc. from taking part. Then add in that those who are able to be priests can only take a woman as a wife if she is a virgin, including explicitly disallowing a priest from taking a widow as a wife! If it had just been that they can’t marry a woman who was a prostitute, or who was illicitly defiled, sure, I can understand that, and if you include a divorced woman in the list, I’m not as easily comfortable with it, but okay, sure, but widows??

Seriously, what is Yahweh doing excluding widows, the disabled, the infirm, etc. from being part of His priesthood?? Aren’t these the very types of people that He directly punishes other nations for neglecting or abusing? Doesn’t He claim to have a heart for exactly these people? Then how does it fit with His character to directly and actively exclude them from this priestly role?????

This is why it doesn’t sit well with me. It seems like something the pagan nations around Israel would do, but this exclusion feels very out of character for the God of Israel.

But there are a couple really important aspects to this to keep in mind if we are going to think about this passage rightly.

The first, and most important, thing to recognize in this is that the priesthood was a primary mechanism by which people learned and filtered truth about Yahweh. They didn’t have the Scriptures, and even what truth they did have revealed about God at this point was not written down for them to reference and study. What they did have though were the tabernacle (and later temple) services, performed by the priests, that taught and reminded them about God.

So there are truths like the fact that God created a perfect world where deformity, disability, and illness were not intended to be part of the picture. He is a God of wholeness and perfection, and it is only humanity’s rebellion that introduced these maladies into His world, so these markers of sin and rebellion aren’t to be part of His priesthood. A widow, in a similar way, is not fit to be the wife of a priest. God is a God of life, and death only entered into His world through sin, meaning that a widow would never have existed had humanity never sought to dethrone God.

So given that Israel’s priesthood is maybe the primary avenue by which the Israelites, as well as the nations around them, will learn about Yahweh, He is carefully communicating truths about Himself, both in what He explicitly does allow and in what He explicitly does not allow for those who are to be His priests.

The second super important thing to recognize is that God, while not allowing these people to serve as priests, is explicitly including and caring for them. As soon as God says that those who are disabled, deformed, chronically ill, etc. cannot serve as priests, He immediately specifies that such men are still able to eat of the holy and most holy things, just like the priests, it is only that they cannot serve at the altar and behind the curtain. No one who was unclean or defiled was allowed to eat of these offerings, so God is explicitly declaring that such things do not make you unclean or defiled, that is not the basis for them not being able to be priests, so they also cannot be excluded on this grounds from any other part of societal or ritual life in Israel.

I tend to think of the priesthood as the people who were closest to God, so then reading who cannot be in that role feels like it is excluding them from closeness with God. But while the priests were definitely closer in physical proximity in that they were allowed to penetrate further into sacred space than a non-priest, their entire function was to facilitate God’s presence and availability to the entire nation of Israel. Being a priest did not give you any more relational availability to God than anybody else. So those excluded from the priesthood were not excluded from closeness with God at all.

I also, in reading things like this, tend to forget that only a very small fraction of Israelites could ever even enter into the priesthood. I think my brain just filters what I’m reading through the church age, where anybody with the desire, commitment, gifting, etc. can enter into the role of a pastor, minister, priest, etc., but that was flatly not the case in Israel. Among the twelve tribes, it wasn’t even an entire tribe that could be priests, it was only a single family line from a single tribe that could fill that function. Even Moses himself and his sons were not eligible! What that means is that this is not a broad categorization or valuation of people and their worthiness, which is how my brain defaults to interpreting it.

God set apart one family, Aaron’s, not because they were so great and special and deserved to be closer to Him (we’ve already seen two of his sons killed for their breach of priestly duties), but because He was setting up an institution that would teach Israel important lessons about who He is and who they are.