Leviticus is where most people give up. It is not the hardest book to understand — it is the hardest to see the point of. Chapter after chapter about animals, skin conditions, mildew in walls, what to do with a garment that has a stain in it.

So start with the question underneath all of it: what kind of God gives instructions like these?

Not a distant one. You do not legislate about a man’s roof, or his wages, or the mould in his house, unless you are interested in his roof and his wages and his house. This is a covenant God who declines to be interested only in the religious hour. He has opinions about your food, your clothing, how you govern yourselves, how you settle a dispute with the man next door, and what you do about the poor at harvest.

It is also one of the most important books in the Bible, laying the foundation for our understanding of the final sacrifice of Christ. It is this book that gives the key to understanding fully the work of Christ on our behalf. To my mind, the New Testament is contained here in seed form.

Read it through once or twice in a modern translation, and then go back to the sections emphasized below.

Read Hebrews alongside it

Read Hebrews alongside this book. Not eventually — alongside. Chapters 8 to 10 are a sustained commentary on the priesthood, the sanctuary and the sacrifices, written by someone who assumed his readers knew Leviticus well. And chapter 11 is the one that settles what the whole system was running on, which was never the animals.

Wherever this page quotes Hebrews below, that is why.

Bringing the lamb was an act of faith

Leviticus is where people get the idea that the Old Testament is a religion of works and the New Testament is a religion of grace. It is worth thinking about that more carefully, because it is not what is happening here.

Suppose you have sinned, and the law tells you to bring a lamb. What exactly are you doing when you walk to the tabernacle with an animal under your arm?

You are not paying. You cannot pay. And you know it — nobody standing there believed a sheep was morally equivalent to what they had done. The writer of Hebrews says it outright, and he is not correcting anybody:

For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Hebrews 10:4 · Legacy Standard Bible

So the lamb never took anything away. Which means the man bringing it was doing something other than settling an account. He was taking God at His word. God had said this would be accepted, until something better came, and the man believed Him enough to act on it — at cost, in public, carrying an animal he knew could not possibly be adequate.

That is not a work. That is faith, doing the only thing faith ever does, which is take God seriously enough to move.

And the New Testament says so. The great chapter on faith is populated almost entirely by people who lived under this system, and it opens with a man bringing an offering:

By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he was approved as being righteous.

Hebrews 11:4 · Legacy Standard Bible

By faith he offered. The first sacrifice in Scripture, and it is credited to belief rather than to the act. And the line the New Testament quotes three separate times to establish that we are justified by faith is not a New Testament line at all — it is Habakkuk: the righteous will live by faith.

So the difference between then and now is not works against grace. It is a promise believed forward against a promise believed backward. They brought a lamb because God said He would accept it. We look at a cross because God said He has. In both cases the one thing required is that you believe Him.

If anything, theirs was the harder ask. We are looking back at something finished.

And a good deal of it was dinner

Here is the other thing the word sacrifice hides from us. We picture everything going up in smoke. Much of it did not.

With the peace offerings — the fellowship offerings — a portion was burned, a portion went to the priest, and the rest was eaten by the man who brought it, there, at the sanctuary.

Now as for the flesh of the sacrifice of his thanksgiving peace offerings, it shall be eaten on the day of his offering.

Leviticus 7:15 · Legacy Standard Bible

And the instruction for what that occasion was supposed to feel like is not solemn at all.

You shall sacrifice peace offerings and eat there and be glad before Yahweh your God.

Deuteronomy 27:7 · Legacy Standard Bible

So picture it properly. A man who has been out of fellowship brings what God asked for. Part of it is given. And then he sits down with his family and eats the rest in God’s presence, glad — because the meal is the evidence. You do not eat at a man’s house if you are still estranged from him.

That is not the machinery of a religion of works. That is a shared meal with the God who invited you to come, laid on as proof that you have been brought back in.

And it should ring a bell. The last thing Jesus does with His friends before the cross is eat with them. The thing He leaves the church is a meal. When Leviticus wants to show a man that he is restored, it feeds him — and so does He.

The two commandments are already here

Here is the thing that reframes the whole book, and almost nobody notices it.

When Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest, He gives two. Love God with everything. And then:

And the second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 22:39–40 · Legacy Standard Bible

He is quoting Leviticus.

You shall not take vengeance, and you shall not keep your anger against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am Yahweh.

Leviticus 19:18 · Legacy Standard Bible

The book everyone skips contains the sentence Jesus said the entire law hangs on. It is sitting in the middle of chapter 19, surrounded by instructions about harvesting, wages, honest scales and not gossiping — which is exactly the point. Loving your neighbour is not a sentiment. It is what you do at the edge of your field and on payday.

And that is the shape of the Ten Commandments too. The first table is how to love God; the second is how to love your neighbour. If you love God you will not put anything in His place. If you love your neighbour you will not kill him, or take his wife, or lie about him in court.

Then the tenth commandment does something the other nine do not. It is the only one you cannot break with your body.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife… or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Exodus 20:17 · Legacy Standard Bible

Nine are about what you do. The tenth is about what you want. Which means the law already ends where the Sermon on the Mount begins — with the heart. Jesus was not adding an interior dimension to the commandments. He was reading the last one out loud.

What this book is for, when you reach the Gospels

Here is the thing that makes Leviticus worth the effort, and it is not obvious until you put two lists side by side.

Leviticus and Numbers name the people who could not come. Not because God disliked them — because uncleanness in this system is contagious, and the camp had the presence of God in the middle of it. And unclean here does not mean dirty, and it does not mean sinful. It is a ritual category — whether a person could come near the tabernacle at that moment. Touching a corpse made you unclean; so did childbirth. It is about approach, not morality. Atonement, the word this book turns on, is the putting-right that lets someone approach again. A leper lived outside the camp and called out a warning. A woman with a discharge made unclean every bed she lay on and every chair she sat in, and anyone who touched them. A man who had touched a corpse was sent out. Priests with a physical defect could not approach the altar.

Command the sons of Israel that they send away from the camp every leper and everyone having a discharge and everyone who is unclean because of a dead person.

Numbers 5:2 · Legacy Standard Bible

Now set that beside the healings.

Nearly every category has a name attached to it in the Gospels. These were not simply kindnesses to sick people. They were readmissions. The man gets his sight, and with it the assembly. The woman stops bleeding, and can be touched again.

Three that are more than a pattern

Jesus names Moses. He touches the leper — the one man in Israel nobody touched — and then sends him straight into the procedure this book lays down.

“Go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”

Mark 1:44 · Legacy Standard Bible

He is not going around Leviticus. He is putting the man back through the door Leviticus provides.

The lame man is healed on the threshold. In Acts 3 he is carried every day to the temple gate to beg from the people going in — sitting at the door he cannot cross, living off those who can. Peter takes him by the right hand, and he goes in, walking and leaping and praising God.

And the eunuch is reading the book that overturns his exclusion. Deuteronomy barred him from the assembly. Acts says he had come all the way to Jerusalem to worship — a journey to a place that could not fully receive him — and he is going home reading Isaiah.

Nor let the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says Yahweh, “To the eunuchs who keep My sabbaths… I will give in My house and within My walls a memorial, and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which will not be cut off.”

Isaiah 56:3–5 · Legacy Standard Bible

A name that will not be cut off, said to a man who was. He is baptised at the roadside.

The direction of the flow

This is the whole thing in one observation. In Leviticus, uncleanness travels. Touch the leper and it comes to you. Touch her bed and it comes to you. Touch the dead and you are outside the camp until evening.

Jesus touches all three — the leper, the bleeding woman, the dead girl — and it runs the other way. He does not become unclean. They become clean.

That is not this book being cancelled. That is this book running in the opposite direction, which is what “I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” looks like when you can watch it happen.

Outline of Leviticus

1:1-7:38 — The sacrifices and offerings

8:1-10:20 — The consecration of Aaron and his sons

As you read this section understand that Aaron was the shadow of Jesus, our High Priest, who has fulfilled all. We who are joined to Jesus are priests with no need of an earthly mediator to stand between us and God. Our life is to offer praise to God. Read carefully I Peter 2:9.

• 8:1-36 — The sons of Aaron presented for consecration
• 9:1-24 — Aaron assumes his office
• 10:1-20 — The consequences of sacrilege

11:1-15:33 — Laws regarding uncleanness

This section deals with the way in which the Israelite was to be holy — set apart to God — in his physical life.

Before the difficult passages here, one thing that will save you a great deal of trouble: read them where they were given.

These instructions came to a nomadic people living in tents in a desert, with none of what we have. No refrigeration, no running water, no clinic, no police, no courts as we would recognise them, and no way of isolating a sick man except to put him outside the camp. Read the hard chapters against that, and most of them stop being strange.

That is not to say they no longer apply now that we have the comforts. It is to say the situation should inform how we apply them — and how we live out the same commandments with the things we do have.

Do not dismiss what you read here. Although we do not live under the laws of the Old Testament, we recognize these chapters to be an expression of God’s wisdom. A thing is not right because God said it, but God said it because it is right.

• 11:1-47 — Clean and unclean animals
• 12:1-8 — Ritual cleansing after childbirth
• 13:1-14:57 — Uncleanness due to leprosy and its cleansing
• 15:1-33 — Uncleanness and purification following bodily secretions

In these verses, look for a picture of the death and resurrection of Jesus that brings cleansing to us who are leprous with sin.

16:1-34 — The Day of Atonement

Verses:

• 1-10 — Aaron’s preparations
• 11-14 — Sin offering for the priests
• 15-19 — Sin offering for the people
• 20-22 — The scapegoat
• 23-28 — Completion of the offering
• 29-34 — Final instructions

Read carefully in as many translations as possible Hebrews 8–10. Jesus has summed up the Day of Atonement in His once-for-all sacrifice, having put away sin forever.

The scapegoat: the one goat’s blood was taken into the Holy of Holies and placed on the mercy seat. The people did not see that but accepted it as a fact. The other goat was the visible acting out of that invisible fact before the people. They saw the goat bearing their sin taken to the desert and lost. They knew with their senses that their sin was carried away. So Christ’s blood taking away our sin is presented to the Father — and then the Spirit comes to tell us so, witnessing in our hearts that because of the blood we are accepted.

17:1-25:55 — Various laws

• 17:1-16 — The sanctity of the blood. This chapter is the foundation of our understanding that blood must be shed for sin to be dealt with.
• 18:1-20:27 — Sins against the moral law
• 21:1-22:33 — The way to priestly holiness
• 23:1-44 — The holy feasts
• 24:1-23 — Sacred things and the sin of blasphemy
• 25:1-55 — The Sabbatical years and Jubilee years

Christ has fulfilled these feasts. He is our Sabbath rest (Hebrews 4). He is our Passover (I Corinthians 5:7). He is risen, fulfilling the Feast of Firstfruits (I Corinthians 15:20). In Him Pentecost is fully come (Acts 2:1). The Feast of Tabernacles is the rejoicing believers now know in the Spirit. John 7:37-38 was spoken at the Feast of Tabernacles — this feast will be consummated in the coming of the Lord Jesus, describing our eternal state.

26:1-27:34 — Blessings, curses, vows, and tithes

• 26:1-46 — The blessings and the curses
• 27:1-34 — The vows and the tithes

An eye for an eye is a ceiling, not a licence

One of the most quoted lines in the book, and one of the most misread.

If a man injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

Leviticus 24:19–20 · Legacy Standard Bible

This is not permission to take an eye. In the world it was given into, if you took my eye I might well come back for your head, and then your brother would come for mine. Escalation was the ordinary course of things.

Against that, this is a limit. The penalty may not exceed the injury. And notice who it is addressed to — not the injured man, but the court. Exodus says he shall pay as the judges decide; Deuteronomy says the judges shall inquire thoroughly. This is sentencing policy, not advice on revenge.

Then read the very next verse.

There shall be one standard of judgment for you; it shall be for the sojourner as well as the native, for I am Yahweh your God.

Leviticus 24:22 · Legacy Standard Bible

One standard. The same for the foreigner as for the citizen. In a world where a powerful man’s eye cost you your family, that is a radical restraint.

Which is worth carrying to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus takes it further still: you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye… but I tell you not to oppose an evil person. He is not correcting a barbaric rule. He is moving past a rule that was already holding violence down — from the court may go no further than this to you need not go there at all.

The Day of Atonement

The sixteenth chapter is the centre of the book and the centre of the Israelite year, and it needs more room than a section here allows. It has its own page.

→ The Day of Atonement — the high priest, the linen garments, the two goats and where the sin is laid, the insufficiencies of the old system, and the fulfilment in Christ.

The five offerings

Leviticus opens with five offerings, set out one after another before any of the festivals are commanded. Each one says something different about what it means to come to God.

• Burnt Offering — An offering by fire saying that I belong totally and exclusively to the Lord. The offering, in substitute for me, is burned as a “sweet smelling savour” before the Lord.  Leviticus 1
• Grain Offering (Meal Offering) — Made from very fine flour and oil, offered to the Lord in recognition that He is the total life-giver. The life of God is my life.  Leviticus 2
• Fellowship Offering (Peace Offering) — Celebrating my union and fellowship with God. Recognition that I am in union with my God, and with my brother.  Leviticus 3
• Sin Offering — For sins committed. The animal, in substitute for me, offered to atone for my sin.  Leviticus 4
• Guilt Offering — For forgiveness of guilt for sins committed even unknowingly before the Lord. The animal, in substitute for me, is offered to atone for my guilt.  Leviticus 5

Read them together and they cover the whole of a relationship: belonging, provision, fellowship, sin dealt with, and guilt lifted. Every one of them works by substitution — something dies in the place of the person bringing it — which is the point the book is making long before anyone reaches the Gospels.