Bechukotai (Part 2) - Leviticus 26:3-27:34

Chapter 27 of Leviticus begins with applying values upon people and property. It is part of the "God needs cash" narrative.  For example, if you are someone who is feeling rather generous and you want to donate a sum to the Temple treasury, you would make a vow to give this money. When you do so you might say something like, "I vow to donate the value of my wife to the Temple". Now, if she was, say, 20 years old, you would then have to bring 30 shekels (Leviticus 27:4) to the priesthood (they would, of course, want to confirm her age). So the last chapter of Leviticus is "Here is a system for you to be generous to the Lord".

Now, breaking your vow is a bad thing (Numbers 30:33). The punishment for breaking your vow is to be whipped. So if you vow to give money, you are committed to keeping your word. If you break it, you will be whipped. There is nothing in the Torah that permits men to break their vows, although husbands can nullify the vow of a wife and fathers can do so for their daughters.

I will talk about vows in another post, but here, I want to focus on something very odd, which has to do with killing someone in the Temple.

There is a positive optional commandment to do just that.

But before I discuss that,there's an important word that you need to know the meaning of because if you rely on translations, you will miss this odd item completely.

The word is cherem.

Cherem is sometimes used to indicate "excommunication", but it actually means, "that which will remain apart from you". It is rarely translated that way, so it's important to know.

So if a Rabbi declares that a particular book is cherem, it is something that you should not own or read, and it should remain apart from you as a forbidden thing.

There's also a different use of cherem as well, which is something that is too holy for you to use, so it too is to remain apart from you.

And that's how cherem is being used in Leviticus 27; it refers to a person, property, animal, or crop, after it has been declared very holy (a doubling of the Hebrew word "holy" is assigned to it) and has been handed over to the priesthood. At that point, it is forever cherem and you cannot swap or redeem it.

Wait...did I write "person"?

Yes I did. As we read in Leviticus 27:28:

"However, any cherem that will be made cherem by a man for Yahweh from all that was his - be it a person, or animal, or a field of his ancestral inheritance - may not be sold and may not be redeemed, and cherem is the most holy to Yahweh."

According to Rashi, based on the Sifra, this man would be a gentile slave, since Jewish slaves are not permitted to be sold or traded.

But need he be a slave? Could a non-slave be given over to the priesthood as a gift?

I'll get to that.

But first, look back a few verses and you will see that Leviticus does tell us that if we don't hand the property over to the priesthood, there's a way to get it back before it becomes cherem.

For example, if you call the priest over and say, "You know what, I rather like this ox. Tell me what it's worth and I'll give you the equivalent in gold instead." You must do this before giving the object to the priest, because if you have not given the object over, it is not yet permanently cherem to you, and it (or he or she) can be redeemed with something else of greater value.

Some haggling can ensue, and it's all based upon what the priest agrees to. After all, it's the priest who will determine the value, and the person who wants to redeem it will pay that value, plus an extra fifth or suffer the consequences.

This puts the priesthood is a much better bargaining position.

This brings us to 27:29 -

"Any cherem who/that was made cherem by someone will not be redeemed, it will die-a-death."

This speaks of someone who already handed over the person, animal, or property to the priesthood, and at that point it is now cherem, and the original owner cannot redeem it/him/her.

As I have mentioned before, a doubling of a term in biblical Hebrew applied an intensity to it. This verse has confused many throughout the ages. Some claim that this is a man who is to be executed  for a crime, even though there is no indication that this is the case, and requires that one ignore the previous verse. The reason for calling it an execution is the intensity of the death. We see this in Exodus when the same phraseology is use, and I insert the word "fucking" to add to the intensity to "die a death":

Yes, there seems to be a vengeful form of killing in the cherem verse. It is clear that it is an execution, and an ugly one at that, and not a sacrifice. After all, verse 27:9 indicates that only proper animals are to be sacrificed before Yahweh. 

What do I mean by killing it in an ugly way?

If we look at Exodus 13:13, we read that if you don't redeem a firstling, rather than giving it to the priesthood you can choose to kill it in an ugly way - breaking it's neck.

Could this be the method of to "die a death"?

If we look at Numbers 18:15-17, we read that a firstborn son is owned by the priesthood, but he can be redeemed by the parent. The text seems to infer that one should redeem these firstborns.

But what if the parent doesn't redeem the firstborn and hand him over to the priesthood? Then he becomes cherem.

And as we read, anyone with a status of cherem will fucking die.

After all, a vow is a vow!