Vayikra - Lev. 1:1-5:26

General Details

Last week, we finished a book called "Exodus". The Jewish masoretic tradition calls it "shemot", meaning "names". This is because the word "shemot" appears within the first few words of the text. This is how the titles of the books, as well as the portions, or parashah (plural parshiyot), were named, but they weren't always this way.

This week begins the book "Leviticus". And like "Exodus", the name Vayikra, comes from the fact that vayikra appears within the first few words of the book (it is actually the very first word).

But it wasn't always named vayikra.

Before the masoretic tradition was established, this book was called "torat kohanim" or "Teaching of the [laws of the] priests", and when the text was translated into Greek, the term "Leviticus" or "[The book] belonging to the Levites (priests)".

Later on, the title Vayikra would be used.

Besides naming portions and books, there are traditions as to how the text is written. There are a number of words in the text that will have a letter enlarged or reduced in size, or will have small crowns drawn over some words and not others (Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have different traditions concerning the drawing of these crowns).

So vayikra begins with this word:

As you can see, the aleph (א) is smaller than the one right next to it (אל), and there is a crown over the letter shin in Moses' name.

Now the term Mesorah means "traditional", and so there is a tradition of all of this updating of the names and the characters.

Interestingly enough, there are rules for how the crowns are to be made, depending on your affiliation (Yemenite vs. Easter European Jewry, for example). And everybody has an interpretation as to why these things exists.

Some will say that the small "aleph" indicates that YHVH gently called. Another is that the aleph represents God, whose name is missing from the sentence. Another holds that it indicates a humility by Moses, who wrote it smaller then necessary.

The thing is, nobody really knows, and despite this, the belief in an unbroken oral tradition remains unaffected by any of this.

Points of View

The reference to the priesthood is an interesting one, and still, one should keep in mind that this book does not simply give the details of the priesthood, but rules for the non-priests as well. So the "teaching of the laws  of the priests" is not to be understood that these were laws that the priests were required to perform, but the laws demanded by and enforced by the priesthood cult.

By "cult", I use the term in the same manner as "culture", and "cultivate", meaning, something that is considered special by right of selection. In this case, those who happened to be born from the right family would be considered special and would be the intermediaries between the average person and God.

It should also be noted that many of the great Jewish commentators had differing views about this book, especially since it was obsessed with sacrifices. Some claimed that the later prophets indicated that God did not need or desire sacrifice, and others used those same verses to show how God really did desire sacrifice, but not sacrifice without purification of the soul.

And when it comes to offering a sacrifice to Azazel, these same commentators are all over the place as to who or what was this entity. Those from the middle-ages, and impacted by an obsession concerning demons, had one view, while those who dismissed the idea of demon had a different view.

Again, it appears that the so-called "unbroken tradition" of the "Oral Law" is unable to explain clearly what many of these passages actually mean.

Christian and Jewish Differences

One of the immediate differences that should be noticed is that chapter 5 of the Masoretic Text (MT) has 26 verses, while the Christian version has only 19 verses. 

So where did those 7 verses go?

The MT version of Chapter 6 has 23 verses while the Christian version has 30 verses.

Problem solved!

But why the difference?

There are several such numbering incompatibilities between the MT and the Christian versions.

Sometimes the difference is ideological, and other times it is for symmetry.

In this case, Leviticus 5:20-26 speaks about how to handle thievery, while all of the verses up to that point were about different types of sacrifices. So it appears that the Christian compilers wanted to keep the general theme of offerings intact and push the apparently new tpic into the next chapter.

However, moving that description into the next chapter doesn't correct that problem either. Another possibility is to separate 5:16 from 5:24, since there appears to be a contradiction between these verses.

It's hard to know the actual reason why the Christians made the choices that they did.

But it is worth considering!