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In all matters, beginnings and ends are the vital features. A reader of Leviticus comes away with the overwhelming impression that Moses gives the laws therein to his contemporaries and their future descendants. The laws he produces inaugurate the cult and ordain how it is to function and how both priests and laity are to relate to it. The text clearly communicates that the events of Moses’s life that occur in Egypt and that happen on his and his people’s trek from Egypt to their present location in the desert constitute the beginnings of the nation. Adopting a critical approach to this body of ancient material, the laws as well as the narratives, scholars have long concluded that it is a fictional composition. I share their view. Some lawgiver, writing at a much later time than the purported life of Moses, has attributed to the legendary figure of Moses his own idealistic sense of what constituted Israel’s religious and cultic life. I also share the generally held view that the lawgiver committed to writing matters that belonged to a lost past because the nation was, by his time, exiled (or about to be exiled) in Babylonia. To take stock of how the nation came into being was to affirm that, despite its loss of a land, the people could still have an identity. The nation’s end, its imminent or actual dispersal to Babylonia, inspired a focus on its beginnings. The author of Leviticus gave his composition a rather complicated framework. He set it in the time of Moses, but a good number of Moses’s utterances assume knowledge of later history. I shall highlight this peculiar knowing of future events on the part of Moses. By doing so, I am able to introduce a new dimension to the study Looking at Leviticus Leviticus 10–14 c h a p t e r o n e of the laws and institutions of Leviticus. I part company with other scholars in that I assess differently how the rules came to be incorporated in the book of Leviticus. The general scholarly view understands the Levitical rules as having served, with some updating, practical needs in times past. In contrast, I posit that the rules were newly fashioned at the time of the composition of Leviticus. It is not that these newly minted rules lacked precursors. I hold that, whatever shape those precursors had, the biblical lawgiver transformed them by bringing them to bear on the narrative lore in Genesis–2 Kings. In my view, it was not just annals of law, written or, more likely, unwritten, that lay before the anonymous lawgiver, who updated them one more time, but also annals of stories, including stories of lawgiving. These narrative traditions , as literary as they are historical, inspired him to reformulate the laws known to him. He was not a recorder of historical information but a mythmaker who made judgments in the name of Moses on matters that occurred before, during, and after Moses’s lifetime—as these are recounted in Genesis–2 Kings. A concentration on beginnings by the author of Leviticus is one major key to understanding his composition. The interest is an explicit one. Moses, for instance, inaugurates a system of sacrifices and inducts priests, Aaron and his sons being the first (Leviticus 1–9). But, as we shall see, the Leviticus author’s focus was also on matters that arise for the first time both before and after the time of Moses. There can be no doubt that the author of Leviticus had knowledge of the post-Mosaic period, but the remarkable extent of its range has not been realized.1 Equally important in appreciating how Leviticus came into existence is to note that the author scanned the generations to see if some troubling matter repeats itself. He proceeded as if Moses knew that a problem first turning up in one generation was bound to repeat itself in a following one. There is a double focus: on initial occurrences and later iterations down the generations. My aim is to identify the narrative histories underlying the laws and institutions of Leviticus, to pinpoint how the author produced rules in response to specific problems that arose in Genesis–2 Kings. In this volume, my analysis begins after the account in Leviticus 1–7 of the rules concerning various types of offerings.2 In Leviticus 8, Aaron and his sons are set up at the newly...

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