Levitical law

“ Such must die, or resort to charity; or retrograde, and live by their wits. Good men, in all ages, have striven to obviate these evils. The Levitical law did so by permitting the unfortunate man to sell himself, as a slave, for six years, or for life, as he might choose, under the state of the case; or, in case he did not so choose to sell himself, but became indebted beyond his means, the law forced his sale, and also that of his whole family. Although, to some, this law may look harsh, yet its spirit, intention, and effect were in favour of the general good, of morals, and of life. ”

“ The Levitical law was therefore an innovation, since it prohibited marriages which had formerly been allowed. It also prohibited marriage with a brother's wife, which is generally taken as meant to include his widow; but as in Deuteronomy, xxv, 5, a man is enjoined to marry his brother's widow, if the brother had died childless, it seems probable that the prohibition in Leviticus, xviii, 10, was directed against that form of polyandry in which the associated husbands are brothers, which, as we have before shown, the Israelites certainly at one time had. ”

“ No less instructive to modern law-makers and political economists is the bearing of the Levitical legislation on the social question, the relations of rich and poor, of employer and employed. It is a legislation which, with admirable impartiality, keeps the poor [27] man and the rich man equally in view; a body of law which, if strictly carried out, would have made in Israel either a plutocracy or a proletariat alike impossible. All these things will be illustrated in the course of exposition. ”

“ As long as we live we shall need their assistance, till we come to that world where ordinances will be superseded; and therefore as long as we live we must not forsake the Levites. The reason given (v. 12) is because the Levite has no part nor inheritance with you, so that he cannot grow rich by husbandry or trade; let him therefore share with you in the comfort of your riches. They must give the Levites their tithes and offerings, settled on them by the law, because they had no other maintenance. ”

“ For for this cause I think that the ancient law gave the Levite no share in the general inheritance of the land; that he might have God alone for the portion of his possession, and might always be engaged about the possession in himself, with no eye to any material object. ”

“ There is no reason why we should not be tried just as much as to difficulties put before our intellect, as by temptations appealing to our passions; and, as Bishop Butler has remarked, there are some men who, but for the former, might be found to have hardly any trial at all. (Analogy, Part ii., chapter 6.) If the particular objection here advanced be analyzed, it will be found to be but this:—Why should there have been an omission of this law of the Levirate in Leviticus, when, in the same place, there is the record of a prohibitory exception to it? ”

“ Levi, Leon, commercial economist, born at Ancona; settled in England and was naturalised; drew attention to the want of commercial organisation, and to whose pleading the first chamber of commerce, that of Liverpool, owes its existence; became professor of Commercial Law in King's College, London (1821-1888) .
Levirite Law, a law among the Jews which ordained if a husband died without issue that his brother should take his widow to wife and raise up seed to him (Deut. xxv. 5-10) .
Levites, a body of men divided into courses, the servants of the priests in the worship of the Temple of Jerusalem ”

“ The Levites took care of their own, but the separating of this was left to the owners themselves, the law encouraging them to be honest by reposing a confidence in them, and so trying their fear of God. They are commanded to tithe truly, that is, to be sure to do it, and to do it faithfully and carefully, that God's part might not be diminished either with design or by oversight. Note, We must be sure to give God his full dues out of our estates; for, being but stewards of them, it is required that we be faithful, as those that must give account. ”

“ Thus, also, the prohibition (Lev. xvii. 3) to kill animals anywhere but at the door of the tabernacle, suitable whilst in the wilderness, was modified by Deut. xii. 15, so as to be adapted to their possession of the land. And thus the command (Numb. viii. 24) that the Levites should begin service at the age of twenty-five was modified (1 Chron. xxiii. 24 28) , and the age fixed at twenty. Indeed, this absurd principle, that a law once given is incapable of change or modification, is the Rabbinic argument for the perpetuity of the whole Mosaic law. ”

“ So that if we were not bound by the table of degrees in Leviticus, which is impossible to be proved, if that table be part of God's moral law, given for the guidance of other nations beside the Jews as is there indicated, we are bound by a purer and holier law to Christ, and it would be a most strange argument that what the lower and less perfect rule of life condemns as immoral, the higher and more perfect rule may allow. ”

“ While the formal principles of his logic are those of identity and contradiction, his real principles are those of sufficient reason and of continuity. Nature never makes leaps; everything in nature has a sufficient reason why it is as it is: these are the philosophic generalizations which Leibniz finds hidden in the applicability of mathematics to physical science. Reason finds itself everywhere expressed in nature; and the law of reason is unity in diversity, continuity. ”

“ Gen. xlix., the dispersion of the Levites among the tribes is characterized as a punishment and a curse. They are to be forever homeless and fugitive. Deuteronomy xxxiii. and elsewhere, it is described as a blessing. The Levites have been scattered as good seed over the land. They are the apostles, commissioned to propagate Jehovah's law.
Passing on to the second book of the Pentateuch, we pause before the account of the Revelation on Mount Sinai, beyond a doubt the most important event of Israel's ancient history. Exodus xxiv. 2, Moses alone is to approach the divine presence. ”

“ The Levites are designated “those teaching all Israel, those holy to the Lord,” in reference to what is commanded them in the succeeding verses. The Keth. מבונים does not elsewhere occur, and must be regarded as a substantive: the teachers; but it is probably only an orthographical error for מבינים (Neh 8:7) , as the Keri demands here also. As to the fact, cf. 2Ch 17:8. The Levites had to teach the people in the law. Josiah said to them, “Set the ark in the house which Solomon did build; not is to you to bear upon the shoulder;” ”

“ The most natural solution of the difficulty would seem to be the explanation of Leibniz. The universe is subject to two sets of laws, which are in harmony with one another and organize cosmic matter, the law of efficient causes and the law of final causes. ”

“ And the Archbishop said to me, with a great spirit, "GOD's curse have thou and thine for this teaching! for thou wouldest hereby make the Old Law more free and perfect than the New Law! For thou sayest it is lawful for Levites and to Priests to take tithes in the Old Law, and so to enjoy their privileges; but to us priests in the New Law, thou sayest it is not lawful to take tithes! And thus, thou givest the Levites of the Old Law more freedom, than to priests of the New Law!" ”

“ To the broad and comprehensive tendency which is characteristic of Leibnitz's thinking, philosophy owes a further series of general laws, which all stand in the closest relation to one another and to his monadological and harmonistic principles, viz., the law of continuity, the law of analogy, the law of the universal dissimilarity of things or of the identity of indiscernibles, and, finally, the law of the conservation of force. ”

“ Before undertaking the study of painfully distressing treatises on certain parts of the moral law, the Levite strengthens his soul by prayer, enters thereon simply for the glory of God and the good of souls, and is aided by experienced discreet professors. ”

“ Learned Jews were always experts in the art of evading the most rigid and minute regulations of the Law. For instance, the period of service appointed for the Levites in the Pentateuch was from the age of thirty to that of fifty.108 But we gather from Ezra and Nehemiah that comparatively few Levites could be induced to throw in their lot with the returning exiles ”

“ M’Caul came very near to the application of that text which I have been unfolding, though I was obliged to add, he overlooked its importance in interpreting the law as contained in Leviticus, for he allows that the 18th verse of Leviticus xviii. reaches to, is intended to reach to, and to forbid, this especial union, which otherwise would have been enjoined by the law in Deut. ”

“ More particularly, Leviticus is of use to us now, as holding forth, in a singularly vivid manner, the fundamental conditions of true religion. The Levitical priesthood and sacrifices are no more, but the spiritual truth they represented abides and must abide for ever: namely, that there is for sinful man no citizenship in the kingdom of God apart from a High Priest and Mediator with a propitiatory sacrifice for sin. ”

“ It is a law of nature, one says. But what is a law of nature but the ordinary operation of the Divine Being who made nature? So let us not forget that the reasoning which, because of the confessed severity of this judgment on the sons of Aaron, argues God out of the tenth of Leviticus, and refuses to believe that this can be a revelation of His mind and character, by parity of reasoning must go on to argue God out of nature and out of history. ”

“ But if we deem a man to be best represented by that one of his ideas which shows most prepotency, it is in the direction of the differential calculus that we must look for the genuine Leibniz, and in philosophy we must regard the law of continuity as most Leibnizian. ”

“ It is of immense consequence that Christians should see this issue clearly. While Jesus taught in various ways that Leviticus contains a law given by revelation from God to Moses, these teach that it is a priestly forgery of the days after Ezra. Both cannot be right; and if the latter are in the right, then—we speak with all possible deliberation and reverence—Jesus Christ was mistaken, and was therefore unable even to tell us with inerrant certainty whether this or that is the Word of God or not. ”

“ The law of animal and vegetable life and the law of the universe are identified. The substance of the universe is activity; the law of the universe is interdependence. What is this but to say that the universe is an organic whole? Its activity is the manifestation of life,—nay, it is life. The laws of its activity reveal that continuity of development, that harmony of inter-relation, which are everywhere the marks of life. The final and fundamental notion, therefore, by which Leibniz interprets the laws of physics and mathematics is that of Life. ”

“ The volitional theory is, that we know by intuition or by direct experience the action of our own mental volitions on matter; that we may hence infer all other action upon matter to be that of volition, and might thus know, without any other evidence, that matter is under the government of a divine mind. Leibnitz and the Cartesians, on the contrary, maintain that our volitions do not and cannot act upon matter, and that it is only the existence of an all-governing Being, and that Being omnipotent, which can account for the sequence between our volitions and our bodily actions. ”

“ The book of Leviticus illustrates the origin and growth of law. Occasionally legislation is clothed in the form of narrative—the law of blasphemy, e.g., xxiv. 10-23 (cf. x. 16-20) —thus suggesting its origin in a particular historical incident (cf. I Sam. xxx. 25) ; and traces of growth are numerous, notably in the differences between the group xvii.-xxvi. and the rest of the book, and very ancient heathen elements are still visible through the transformations effected by the priests of Israel, as in the case of Azazel xvi. ”

“ The existence of matter is not only not opposed to the fundamental ideas of Leibniz, but is a necessary deduction from them. It is a necessity of the principle of continuity; for this requires an infinity of monads, alike indeed in the universal law of their being, but unlike, each to each, in the specific coloring or manifestation of this law. The principle of organic unity requires that there be as many real beings as possible participating in and contributing to it. ”

“ What each sovereign citizen of the realm of reality expresses is precisely law. Each is an embodiment in its own way of the harmony, the order, of the whole kingdom. Each is sovereign because it is dynamic law,—law which is no longer abstract, but has realized itself in life. Thus another way of stating the doctrine of pre-established harmony is the unity of freedom and necessity. Each monad is free because it is individual, because it follows the law of its own activity unhindered, unretarded, by others ”

“ But if an unwritten Law, in all the Provinces of a Dominion, shall be generally observed, and no iniquity appear in the use thereof; that law can be no other but a Law of Nature, equally obliging all man-kind. ”

“ These dictates of Reason, men use to call by the name of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves; whereas Law, properly is the word of him, that by right hath command over others. But yet if we consider the same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then are they properly called Lawes. ”