Commentary on the Torah

Leviticus 10 & 11

Richard Elliot Friedman

10:1. Nadab and Abihu. These are parallel to the names Nadab and Abiyah, the sons of Jeroboam I, the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel (1 Kings 14:1; 15:25). King Jeroboam erects golden calves at sanctuaries at Dan and Beth-El. The similarity of the names of the sons of the two men who make golden calves is striking (Exodus 32; 1 Kings 12:28).

10:1. unfitting fire, which He had not commanded them. It is not clear just what Nadab’s and Abihu’s offense is. The text says that they bring fire that is zarah, that YHWH had not commanded them. Some have taken this to mean “foreign” fire and therefore have related Nadab’s and Abihu’s act to foreign worship, i.e., to another god. The term zarah, however, never has the meaning of “foreign” in any other occurrence in the Torah’s law or narrative. It rather denotes “a person or thing that is outside a particular group.” In any context dealing with priests, for example, it refers to a layperson. In the only other context referring to incense burning (Exod 30:9), “unfitting” incense is listed along with sacrifices and libations as things that should not be brought on the special incense altar located inside the Tent of Meeting. That is, there is no suggestion that it means anything foreign, but simply something that is outside the realm of what is permitted, or, as our text says explicitly, “that YHWH had not commanded.” Nadab and Abihu might thus be thought of as having had positive intentions—to bring an incense offering to Elohim—but as unfortunately having acted incorrectly. Or, alternatively, we might imagine a variety of less commendable motives in them. The point is that the text does not deal with their motives because that is not the issue. In the realm of ritual, they have failed to observe a boundary, and so their fate is settled. This is one of several biblical stories that indicate that on the highest levels of the ritual realm, intention does not matter. In the ethical realm it does. The killing of a man, for example, may be found to be murder or to be manslaughter, depending in part on the intention of the person who killed him. In the ritual category, however, there are cases in which innocent motives still do not make one innocent. Only a priest, for example, can enter the Tent of Meeting. If a layperson enters, that person must die, and the law does not provide for taking the motives for the trespass into account. And in the famous case of the ark in 2 Samuel 6, Uzzah touches the ark to steady it because it is rocking on the backs of oxen. His motive is good. But he dies because, like Nadab and Abihu, he has violated the boundary of the holy.

10:2. fire came out from in front of YHWH and consumed. Aaron’s inaugural day of priestly sacrifice is thus to have been a glorious day of pomp and ceremony, miraculously sanctioned by the divine glory and fire; but then this extraordinary thing happens. The two eldest of his four sons bring this offering that YHWH had not told them to make, and the divine fire comes and consumes them. After seven chapters of laws of sacrifices and two chapters describing the ordination rituals, the sudden account of this horrible event in the middle of the ceremonies comes as a shock. It is even more powerful because the exact same words that describe the miraculous consumption of the ordination sacrifice two verses earlier (9:24) now describe the miraculous killing of Nadab and Abihu. It is possible that this account of the deaths of Nadab and Abihu should be regarded as a separate story from the account of the consecration. It is frequently understood that way, especially since it occurs here at the beginning of a new chapter. Still, the division of the biblical books into chapters was made centuries after composition of the books, and there is no break in the flow of the story from the consecration of the priesthood to the death of Aaron’s sons in the manuscripts of Leviticus. Moreover, the last verses of the story of the consecration picture the events as happening in the presence of the entire people, who are assembled (9:22-24); and Moses explicitly refers to the presence of the people in his first words to Aaron after his sons’ deaths. He says, “That is what YHWH spoke, saying, ‘I shall be made holy through those who are close to me, and I shall be honored in front of all the people’“ (10:3). The story of Nadab and Abihu is therefore most probably to be understood as a horror that occurs during the inauguration of the priesthood.

10:3. That is what YHWH spoke. The meaning of Moses’ remark to Aaron is another provocative case of ambiguity in the Torah’s narrative. Is Moses to be viewed as saying these words in horrified recognition of a truth? or as a stinging reprimand to Aaron concerning his sons’ behavior? or as an explanation? The text here specifically notes that Aaron makes no response (“And Aaron was silent”), which is understandable but not helpful and is itself open to a gamut of interpretations.

10:3. I shall be made holy through those who are close to me. The text goes on conveying that there is a burden on “those who are close to me,” as it describes the removal of Aaron’s sons’ bodies by their cousins, and as Moses instructs Aaron and his remaining sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, that they must not mourn for Nadab and Abihu. There follows an account that farther conveys the pain within the priestly family. Moses finds that Aaron and his remaining sons have not eaten the sacrifices of the day as commanded, and he reprimands Eleazar and Ithamar angrily. Aaron replies that, after all that has happened on this day, “If I had eaten a sin offering today would it be good in YHWH’s eyes?” And the story concludes with a play on this last wording, noting that Aaron’s answer “was good in Moses’ eyes” (10:19-20). Their pain is a reminder that the standard for leaders is tougher than for others.’ According to the Torah, leaders do not get away with more because of their positions. Priests, prophets, kings, rabbis, presidents: they suffer harder consequences. This in turn sets up what will happen to Moses and to Aaron themselves later.  Moses quotes Elohim here as saying, “I shall be made holy through those who are close to me.” For those of us who know what is coming later in the story, this is a shivering preparation for the episode of Moses’ own sin. When Moses will strike the rock at Meribah. Elohim will impose a frightful consequence for him and for Aaron. And the reason that Elohim will give to Moses and Aaron will be: “Because you did not trust in me, to make me holy before the eyes of the children of Israel” (Num 20:12). Moses’ own words to Aaron here will come to testify against him there. And as Aaron is silent here, Moses makes no answer there.

10:8. YHWH spoke to Aaron. This is the first time that Elohim speaks directly to Aaron alone since He first sent him to meet Moses (Exod 4:27), and it is right after the death of his sons! It may be that the significance of what Nadab and Abihu have done is the reason that the deity now addresses Aaron directly concerning the limitations and responsibilities of his family. Or perhaps we should understand this as an act of comfort from Elohim to Aaron after his frightful loss.

10:9. You shall not drink wine and beer. Some have suggested on the basis of this verse that Nadab and Abihu had been drunk and that this is what caused them to commit the offense. Admittedly, this prohibition of alcohol for the priests when they enter the Tabernacle seems otherwise unrelated to the context, but that is not sufficient grounds to denigrate these priests. Whether one believes them to be historical persons or literary characters, one must be circumspect in judging biblical figures. It is good practice for being circumspect when we judge living persons.

10:10. to distinguish. Leviticus is concerned with orderliness. This orderliness is reminiscent of the creation account in Genesis 1. There are key parallels of wording, especially the term for distinction (lehabdil). As Elohim creates by making distinctions, expressed in divine speech, in Genesis (“Elohim distinguished between the light and the darkness”), so the function of the priesthood is described in Leviticus as “to distinguish (lehabdil) between the holy and the secular, and between the impure and the pure.” Here law is conceived as a reflection in the human realm of the order that was originally pictured in the cosmic realm.

10:10. to distinguish between the holy and the secular. Rabbi Simcha Weiser quoted an expression to me: The problem with American Jews today is that they know how to make kiddush (the blessing over wine), but they don’t know how to make habdalah (the ceremony ending the Sabbath and beginning the secular week). That is, they do not know how to distinguish between the holy and the secular. James Kugel sent me something he wrote: “One of the crucial concepts of biblical religion is almost altogether absent from modern life. The whole of the biblical world was divided into two great domains: “the holy and the profane.” In The Hidden Face of God, I hinted at a path through discoveries of the last century about the origin of the universe that may lead us back to appreciation of the holy, the awesome, the wonder of the universe.

10:10. between the impure and the pure. The Hebrew terms here are also frequently translated as the “unclean” and the “clean.” Neither pair of terms quite conveys the sense of the Hebrew, which, first of all, employs terms, tamé and tahor, having two different roots, thus perhaps conveying more clearly that these terms refer to two distinct conditions, each of which has a particular legal status. That is, being tamé is more than merely being un-tahor. To be tamé is to be in a particular condition, the qualities of which are invisible but which can be transmitted to other persons or objects by contact. Therefore, physical separation and various prescribed acts are required to remove this condition. One comes to be in a condition of being tamé as a result of specific occurrences: from menstruation, from other flows of matter from the body’s sexual organs, from a woman’s giving birth (for a week if it is a male baby, two weeks if it is a female), from contact with a corpse (of a human, of a forbidden animal, or of a permitted animal if it died of disease or was killed by another animal), from certain forms of leprosy, or from contact with persons or objects that are tamé. (One may also become tamé from a forbidden sexual relationship, although the term may possibly be understood differently in the relevant passage, 18:24-30, and is in fact usually rendered differently in translations; cf. also the case of human sacrifice, 20:3.) When one performs certain acts to restrict and remove this condition (separation, bathing, and, in some circumstances, sacrifice), one returns to a condition of being tahor.

The common element appears to be that all these cases that make an individual tamé involve some sort of visible change in body fluids and/or skin, although here, as with the forbidden animals (see the next chapter), there may be a convergence of factors that are operative. 

It is sometimes suggested that all these cases are related to death. But this is not correct. One must account for the inclusion of menstruation and childbirth, which relate to the start of life, not to its end. We may extend the explanation, then, and say that all these cases relate to the start or the end of life. But even this does not really account for the inclusion of leprosy among the tamé conditions. My colleague Jacob Milgrom has suggested that the leprous conditions all involve the wasting of a body in some way that resembles the wasting of a corpse. This is possible but hard to prove in the absence of evidence that people in biblical times made this connection in their minds. The evidence that Milgrom gives is the case in which Miriam is stricken with leprosy, and Aaron pleads with Moses, “Let her not be like the dead who, when he comes out of his mother’s womb, half of his flesh is eaten up!” But this is a unique case: Miriam is stricken by Elohim with a kind of leprosy so that she is rendered utterly pale (“leprous as snow”). This singular colorless condition of her skin may be what makes her comparable to a corpse. And Aaron is comparing her not just to any corpse but to a stillbirth. His exclamation in that story is not adequate evidence to make a general connection between leprosy and death.

The essential common point, it seems to me, is that these are all things that most people in most societies instinctively do not want to touch: blood, semen, diseased skin, corpses. It may be that ancient Israelites came to give all these things that they found repugnant to touch a common name: tamé. And then, in a second stage, people came to think of tamé as a category and felt the need to find a common underlying factor.

Was being tamé understood to be a condition in which one was covered with some sort of microscopic creatures like a spreading bacterium that had to be washed away (as some have believed to this day), or was it conceived as comparable to an infectious illness, or was it strictly a status that was conceived in legal definition? Biblical law, like biblical narrative, has its share of ambiguities, albeit of a different sort from narrative ambiguity. These gaps in the information that the text provides exist, first, because the laws are pictured as coming directly from Elohim, who is not bound to explain or justify His commandments to those whom He commands. Second, the law codes, like constitutional law, are statements of the primary principles and cases, leaving the details and variations to be worked out by priests or judges as they arise (Lev 10:10-11). Third, much of the law was practiced in the daily life of the people of Israel over centuries, and so what appear as gaps to us may have been common knowledge in the community in which the text was composed.

11:1. YHWH spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying. This is only the second report of laws being addressed to Aaron along with Moses. The first law given to the people, the Passover command, is pronounced to both Moses and Aaron (Exod 12:1), but then the laws are stated only to Moses. Indeed, the only other time that YHWH has spoken to both Moses and Aaron until now was at the beginning of their mission in Egypt (and there the text does not report the words that Elohim says to them). The inclusion of Aaron at this point may be more of the divine response to Aaron’s loss of his sons (see comment on 10:8). Or it may be because Elohim has just told Aaron that he and his sons are to instruct the people and distinguish between holy and secular and between impure and clean (10:10-11), and so now Elohim begins to inform Aaron of the laws that he needs to know.

11:2. This is the animal that you shall eat. The laws of permitted and forbidden animals add further restrictions to the sacrificial laws. Elohim requires not only ritual slaughter, priestly performance, and location at the Tent of Meeting; Elohim delineates to Moses and Aaron which animals may be eaten as well. Among land animals: those that have split hooves and chew their cud. In water: those with scales and fins. (Redundant? All scaled fish have fins.) In the air: the forbidden birds are named one by one, and all flying creatures that have four legs are forbidden. Also forbidden are creatures that have numerous legs, those that crawl on their bellies, and any animals at all that have died on their own or that have been killed by other animals. The reasons for these particular inclusions and exclusions have never been worked out persuasively. Explanations based on health and hygiene are difficult to defend, both because the text never states this and because such explanations cannot be consistently applied to the cases. Popular claims about the unhealthy habits of pigs, for example, apply equally to various fowl that are permitted. Some suggest that the Israelites may have observed empirically that people who ate pork suffered more illness than others, but this is without any textual or historical evidence; nor does it explain how this fact was apparent to Israelites but unobserved by the rest of the world for thousands of years. Popular claims that the forbidden animals were objects of worship are simply wrong. Suggestions that the system is ultimately about matters of ethics and not food—that is, that it teaches discipline, self-denial, and so on—are not supported in the text. The text rather relates various food laws to issues of impurity and “abomination,” which fall in the realm of ritual, not ethical, categories. Observance of ritual laws may have an ethical dimension, such as discipline, but this may be said of all ritual laws. It sheds no special light on this particular group of commandments.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested what is perhaps the most-cited treatment at present (Purity and Danger), which she and I have discussed: that the issue is one of defined classes of animals: Split-hoofed, cud-chewing animals are “the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist” (p. 54), and so this became the model of what was appropriate to eat. Wild goats and antelope share these two characteristics and therefore were acceptable. Pigs, which have a split hoof but do not chew their cud, were excluded originally for the sole reason that they did not fit this class as defined. Similarly with the forbidden water creatures: they did not fit the class that had the “right” kind of locomotion, namely fins and scales. Similarly with animals that have two hands and two legs (weasels, mice, lizards) but walk on all fours like a quadruped: they “perversely” use hands for walking. Not having the right form of locomotion, they are forbidden.

Douglas’s explanation appears to me to be a self-defining system. Whatever is permitted she identifies as what the Israelites perceived to be “right.” Whatever is forbidden, she concludes, came to be forbidden because it did not fit the category. This is mere definitional description unless it can shed some light on the underlying reasons for these perceptions of what was proper. Where Douglas tries to identify the reasons she errs, in my judgment. The assertion that the split hoof and the chewing of cud were “the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist” is unhelpful without proof that Israel was in fact primarily a pastoral society. It was not. (And Leviticus 11 certainly does not appear to come from a pastoral circle. It comes from an urban priesthood.) Nor does this explain why the non-Israelite residents of the land, who alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) lived on the same sites, conceived of these same animals so differently. Excavations uncover pig bones in a Canaanite layer of a site, then no pig bones in an Israelite layer of the same site, then pig bones again in the site’s next Canaanite layer. There is likewise no reason to associate the presence of scales on a fish with a concept of a proper form of locomotion. And Douglas’s notion of a “perverse” form of locomotion by animals whose front limbs are handlike is simply a misunderstanding of the Hebrew term (kap), which does not mean “hand.” It  refers elsewhere to both the hands and the feet (Gen 8:9; Deut 2:5; 11:24; 28:35,56; Josh 1:3; 2 Sam 14:25) and is correctly translated “paws” (a translation that Douglas appears to eschew). In its context here it follows a verse that refers to the matter of split hooves (11:26), and it is simply forbidding all animals that have soft paws rather than hooves. Douglas’s treatment may add some helpful perspectives to the discussion, but the essential mystery remains unsolved.

I have tried here to exclude some of the common explanations that appear to me to be looking in the wrong directions, and I mean to identify some elements that should be taken into account. The first is: similarity to humans. The fact that the text elsewhere has conceived of animals, but not plants, as having the quality of life (nefesh) in common with humans, even though plants do in fact live and die, already means that the degree of similarity to humans figured in the distinctions, whether consciously or not. Plants were so different from humans as not to be thought of as a life-form in the same sense and therefore not even considered as having to be permitted or forbidden. In the animal kingdom, meanwhile, on a continuum of likeness to humans, at one extreme would be cannibalism, which is so extreme as not even to be considered (unless the law against human sacrifice is understood necessarily to prevent it). Next would be the ape family, which is forbidden, having soft hands and feet; then all fellow creatures having soft hands and feet or paws (kap) like humans rather than hooves. Next might be all animals that, like humans, are carnivorous (thus including numerous land animals, all birds of prey, and various reptiles). The permissible animals would then be those that are twice-distinguished from humans, both having a split hoof and chewing their cud. Animals that have only one of these are especially singled out by species, such as pigs (which have a split hoof but do not chew the cud) and camels (which chew the cud but do not have a split hoof). This does not explain all of the permissions and prohibitions of Leviticus 11. Notably, it does not account for water creatures (few creatures are as unlike humans as lobsters) or insects (why are locusts permitted?). It does, however, relate to enough of the distinctions that it should be taken into account in any attempt to explain this list. Ultimately, since no single underlying principle has been discovered that accounts for all the distinctions, it appears likely that there is a convergence of two or probably more factors. It could be a combination of a principle (such as likeness to humans) and completely idiosyncratic factors (a distaste, phobia, or even allergy on the part of some individual in an authoritative position).

For the larger purpose of coming to an understanding of Leviticus, it is important for now to note the fact of distinction and how seriously and pervasively it is developed here in regard to a basic function of life. The list confirms this explicitly by concluding:

This is the instruction (torah) for animal and bird and every living being that moves in the water and for every being that swarms on the earth, to distinguish (lehabdil) between the impure and the pure, and between the living thing that is eaten and the living thing that shall not be eaten. (11:46-47)

11:9. all that are in the water. There is no differentiation of species of water creatures in the entire Tanak. All fish are simply called dag. My colleague Jacob Milgrom has proposed that the reason for this is that ancient Israelites knew little of fish because the eastern Mediterranean was not suitable for fish until the opening of the Suez Canal in our era, which changed the ecology of that sea. But even if this were so—that there were no fish in the eastern Mediterranean—the Israelites still had the Red Sea, the Sea of Galilee, and the Jordan River. Surely those who lived near these bodies of water knew one fish from another. A more likely explanation is that the list of permitted and forbidden animals came from the Jerusalem priesthood, and before the invention of refrigeration it would have been extremely rare for anyone in Jerusalem to have an opportunity to eat fish.

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