Illuminating Leviticus: A Study of Its Laws and Institutions in the Light of Biblical Narratives (review)

For a biblical scholar to claim that he is able to explain “how every law in the Pentateuch came to be formulated and why the Pentateuch is a unique combination of law and narrative” (Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18–20 [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997], p. vii) and to spend forty years demonstrating his theory, he is either in a state of delusion for such a long time or he has made one of the most important discoveries since the rise of critical study of the Pentateuch. And that’s why on the one hand Carmichael’s theory has been regarded as cogent and persuasive (by N. Wyatt in his review of Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible [SOTS Book List 1988, p. 142], but on the other hand as controversial and extreme (by B. S. Jackson [SOTS Book List 2000, p. 142]).

The theory that biblical laws are responses to narratives (Genesis to 2 Kings) and not to social situations is the central claim of a series of books and articles published in the last forty years in Carmichael’s long academic life. The publication under review is the latest harvest of Carmichael’s effort to verify his theory. The beginning of this research program can be traced back to his article “Deuteronomic Laws, Wisdom and Historical Traditions” in JSS 12 (1967): 198–206, an effort later developed into his first book The Laws of Deuteronomy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), which was supplemented by a similar book entitled Law and Narrative in the Bible: The Evidence of the Deuteronomic Laws and the Decalogue (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985). The method of linking laws to narratives that Carmichael applied to the laws in Deuteronomy was applied to Leviticus 19 in chapter 2 of his book The Spirit of Biblical Law (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996). The main substance of this chapter now appears in Law, Legend, and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18–20, published a year later. Thus, Illuminating Leviticus is Carmichael’s second book devoted entirely to elucidating the connections between laws in Leviticus and stories in Genesis–2 Kings, which now focuses on the rules in Lev. 10–17 and 21–25.

In the Introduction, Carmichael reiterates his view: the laws in the Torah are didactic in nature and were not written for juridical proceedings but for the recipients to reflect on their own (literary) history so as to know “how they should conduct themselves in the present” (p. 8). Existing attempts to relate biblical laws to real-life problems and situations are dismissed as “speculative” (p. 9)—more or less in the manner in which he dismissed Noth’s view as being “no warrant” in his first book (for a critique of which see Bernard M. Levison’s article in HTR 83:3 [1990]: 227–57).

Chapter 1 of the book focuses on Leviticus 10–14. Carmichael suggests that Lev. 10 addresses the unacceptable behavior of Eli’s sons in 1 Samuel. Lev. 11 was inspired by the mention of clean and unclean animals in the flood story in Genesis. Childbirth (Lev. 12) came to the legislator’s attention because he was reading 1 Samuel 3, 4 in which childbirth is mentioned. Chapter 2 relates Lev. 15 (uncleanness due to discharges) to David’s uncleanness (1 Samuel 20: 26). I found Chapter 3 one of the most interesting chapters of the book because there Carmichael draws our attention to ancient or medieval Jewish sources which contain precedents for what he is now doing—connecting the ritual of Yom Kippur (Lev. 16) with the story of Joseph. In Chapter 4 he links Lev. 17:2–9 (on the slaughter of animals) to Gen. 37 (the slaughter of a goat by Jacob’s sons) and the Flood Story (Gen. 9). In Chapter 5, the blood...