Exodus 31-40, Leviticus 1-27

Aaron takes on the rebellious sibling mantel as these passages from Exodus begin, helping the Hebrews cast their graven cow while Moses converses with God, only to blame it on everyone else and a huge coincidence (!) when his big brother asks him about it.  Not surprisingly, Aaron is not spoken of in such favorable terms from this point onward.

What's really interesting here, however, is the contrast between how God and Moses react to the situation.  At first, God is ready to go old school Genesis on his chosen people, to smite them out of existence and keep Moses around as another Noah, or Abraham.  Moses talks him out of it.  And then does his own smiting.  It's interesting on a number of levels.  In Genesis, Abraham has to do a fair bit of negotiating with God in order just to save Lot.  Here, and as perhaps a running commentary on a remarkable partnership overall, he has no qualms taking Moses' sage advice.  Which, again, Moses then personally undoes.

A lot of these trials the Hebrews put God through seem to be a reflection on all the plagues he visited on the Egyptians earlier, a test of faith, and on the whole they manage to pass (somehow).  If you want to know the ways in which other peoples just didn't measure up, or why the flood or sacking of Sodom and Gomorrah happened, this might be a good place to look.  A little later, as Leviticus outlines a lot of things that are called abominations, it's mighty tempting (and in fact one of the parts of the Bible people seem to have paid actually read) to assume those were the reasons he chose.

But.  And perhaps I'm about to commit blasphemy or something, but.  I think I have a revision to the ten commandments.  I mentioned before that earlier when they were gone over the specific phrase "ten commandments" was nowhere to be found.  There were in fact a lot more than ten originally.  And when they're reiterated again as God is helping Moses fashion the tables again after he's smote them in his rage, there's further source for confusion, because there's a reference that suggests when this is done only the first of the two tables is redone, but it can just as easily be interpreted as God himself redoing the first one and Moses the second.  And there's even the possibility that the ten and most important commandments are not exactly the ones everyone knows.

This is my argument.  The phrase "ten commandments" comes after a list that very specifically goes over the terms of worship God has been talking about with considerable emphasis already.  In fact, these terms are repeated so often it may be very easily understood if you want to go against millennia of tradition, that these are the rules most important to him.  Since they're not as concisely outlined as the first time God explains his rules, I have to guess exactly how they work, but here goes:

1. This one is more or less the same as the original, having no gods before God.
2. Tear down the altars of the gods of others.
3. Thou shalt not make graven images.
4. Feast of unleavened bread.
5. First-borns belong to God (which would make sense given the last plague against Egypt).
6. An ass and a lamb first-born together.
7. All human first-borns to be redeemed, which may indicate the covenant of circumcision.
8. Keep holy the Sabbath.
9. Three holy festivals throughout the year.
10. Guidelines concerning sacrificial offerings.

I may be smited before I get a chance to read the rest of the Bible.  I know this.  Carry on.

Then the ark of the covenant is put together as previously outlined, and takes about as much time to accomplish as it took to describe.  Repetitions of this nature, such a common aspect of the Bible to this point, bear the mark of oral tradition, and also maintaining awareness for the specific details later generations intended to follow active.  

That's how Exodus ends.

Leviticus is a reiteration of the rules for living previously described in Exodus, plus a few additional guidelines and even some more of God smiting people (Aaron's sons).  There's some of this that was clearly carried on for many generations after, both by Jews and Christians, although I may further court blasphemy by suggesting it's hard to pick one guideline over another when all of it was clearly geared toward the specific living conditions of that time.  The extended look at leprosy, for instance, suggests that Moses very clearly understood the sorry state of medicine in his day.  There was nothing else to do but shun the seriously sick, because otherwise there was the risk of contaminating everyone, and that would not be a great way to keep everyone alive.  When Jesus later undoes a lot of what Moses set up, such as the way he treated leprosy or some of the basic rules of how to live (not to mention the revision of the most important commandment) he's advancing the cause of civilization past what it had been before his time.  He's providing an update.  He's the new Moses, among other personifications, as well as the new Adam, born of the new Eve, which is one way Christians have a hugely positive female role model where so many of the early Old Testament women, such as the original Eve, seemed like such sorry examples to follow, and helped justify thousands of year of gender suppression.  When you read the Bible, in other words, it's a considerable case of logical fallacy to assume that all the conditions of an earlier time can be directly translated to your own.  Do Jews still sacrifice bulls?  Maybe I don't know enough about Jews today, but I don't think so.  They're very good for tradition, but that doesn't seem to be like one of those traditions they still follow.  This is not to say all the rules to be found here are invalidated, but that you can't just assume that because it's there you have to take it for its word.  Yet Jews and Christians have been doing that, selectively, for an incredibly long time.  There's even the foundation for Christian confession, later echoed, after a kind, by Jesus.  The rules against incest, by the way, were probably freshly in the minds of the Hebrews, having escaped Egyptians whose rulers practiced this to such an extent pharaohs up to and including King Tut were physically deformed because of it.  It's not just bad morally, but genetically.

That's Leviticus in a nutshell.  There is a random reference to someone named Azazel, which may be the first named indication of Satan's existence beyond the serpent in Genesis's Garden of Eden, but as in a lot of the information to be found in the early books it seems like implied knowledge, the way you might reference the Sox winning the Series today.  Chances are good most people would know what you're talking about if you say that in conversation.  In a thousand years?  Sorry, Boston fans, that will probably not be the case anymore.

One further meditation before we move onto another book of Moses.  Since I've already been making all these connections between Old and New Testament, a lot of people tend to see a disconnect between the presentation of God between them.  Given that Jesus is presented as the son of God and in fact God himself, and that he can display many of the same attributes as the God of Abraham, I don't find this as much of a stretch.  When God speaks with Jesus, he never comes right out, but hides, the way he does around Moses, since otherwise would be deadly to anyone else.  There's also the transfiguration, which is another event very similar to what we're told about God in his relationship with Moses.

It can challenge your faith to read the Bible, if you reading the Bible.  You begin to see holes in the logic.  If you must believe everything, you may choose to believe nothing at all, because there's certainly that possibility.  As a whole, however, as I'm reading, I'm seeing how the answers you need to overcome these challenges are in there already.  The God who smote the earth in a flood was talked down by Moses later.  God is never presented as perfect.  He believes he's made a giant mistake several times.  He knows he has very real rivals.  (You may want to read Neil Gaiman's American Gods for a theory as to what happens to a god when people stop believing in them.)  And yet he kindles a special relationship, gives mankind every chance to redeem himself.  And if you're a Christian, you see that he takes the definitive move a little later to do the redemption himself.  Jews and Christians disagree on a lot of points.  Maybe as I continue to read I'll better understand how Jews decided to forgo the leap of faith that led to Christianity.  In a lot of ways, their promised land exists today in Israel.  Do, or did or will, they have the mighty ruler they prophesied as their messiah?  Who knows?  

The journey continues.