Leviticus and Numbers

1 Landed Interpretation

1 Landed Interpretation An Environmental Ethicist Reads Leviticus Kristel A. Clayville Landed Context The title of this essay is a little misleading, suggesting that I write from a single location, when in fact my training in multiple disciplines gives me liminal academic status. I am not only an environmental ethicist; I am a former biblicist and archaeologist who has chosen ethics as her academic home because it is an ideal place for posing questions about ancient texts and modern life. I was raised in the Disciples of Christ, a low-church Protestant denomination that developed in rural Kentucky and whose sole article of faith is, “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.”1 I was always more comfortable with the second half of that statement of belief, and so I organized my studies around archaeological and textual studies of the Bible. Thus I am an environmental ethicist with training in critical methods of engagement with the Hebrew Bible, and one who has gotten her hands dirty at the archaeological sites of Castra, Ein Gedi, Sepphoris, and Kirbet Cana. Not only do I have a liminal academic context, but I also have a liminal personal context. I spent my early years in Kentucky, where the Appalachian Mountains give us a different view of what is possible. There is quite a bit of both looking up and climbing up to be done, but there are also physical barriers to vision and long paths around mountains to be plotted. The mountains form a culture by isolation, but also by nourishment. And so I have a strong sense of the constructive force that place has in making people who they are, both socially and religiously. I come from the blending of two farming families, and I was always aware that my parents had chosen to leave the life of the land. My liminality comes from having one foot in the modern world, full 9 of its technological advances, and one foot in an older, almost tribal culture that prioritizes kinship ties and insider status while shirking much of what the modern world has to offer. It is no small wonder that I, having been formed in this environment, gravitate toward environmental ethics. I was reared with a love of nature, skepticism toward modern inventions, and an emphasis on the Bible. Bringing all of these parts of myself together without demonizing any one of them has been part of my long academic journey. In addition to living in this liminal space academically and personally, I also inhabit it legally. As a woman married to a woman, my travels from place to place result in legal confusion. Am I in a state that recognizes the legal standing of my relationship? Do the state laws or the city laws govern my relationship at this time? These questions and others plague my movements and push me to think critically about place and its relationship to law. I am often put in the position of asking the question, Where am I? as the necessary precursor to, Who am I?—at least in relation to the other people of the lands that I traverse. This liminal legal status allows me to think of myself analogically as a ger in the land of Israel, who in Lev. 19:33 is extended the courtesy of legal standing. Yet the explicit mention suggests that the people did not simply assume the legal standing of strangers. Of course, my marriage is also a contentious subject religiously. My social location pushes back against that simple reading: “No book but the Bible,” forcing an abundance of meaning for me or no meaning at all. I cannot read the statement as reductionistically limiting my own self-definition, but rather, I must engage the Bible as a polyphonous text, polyvalent and overflowing with meaning. In an effort to preserve meaning, I develop interpretations of the biblical text that honor my own investment in it but that don’t result in self-immolation. To this end, I often rely on an intertwining of premodern interpretive principles with the historical-critical method. Or more to the point, I embrace the Documentary Hypothesis while also affirming the superabundance of meaning within the biblical text. In short, an interweaving of my personal and academic contexts shapes my relationship to the biblical text and influences my reading. My own commitments to the biblical text do not allow me to ignore Leviticus, but in fact demand that I engage it to bring...