INTRODUCTION TO PART 2
For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. For I am the LORD that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy (Lev. 11:44-45).
God here identifies Himself as a holy God. He also identifies Himself as the God who had delivered the Israelites from the bondage of Egypt. This self-identification as the God who delivered His people in history is the identifying aspect of point two of the Mosaic Covenant: historical prologue.(1) In Leviticus 11:45, God identifies Himself as possessing lawful authority over His people: hierarchy.
Leviticus 8-16 is concerned with the priesthood in general,(2) but with cleansing in particular. The priesthood was in charge of identifying and attending to the marks of ritual and physical uncleanness in society: food laws, childbirth laws, leprosy, discharges of the flesh, and the day of atonement.(3) This section begins with the ritual washing of the priests: Aaron and his sons (Lev. 8:6). It ends with the day of atonement, which is specifically identified as a means of cleansing: "For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD" (Lev. 16:30).
Ritual cleanliness was mandatory for a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6) that had been set apart (sanctified, made holy) by God as His special people. This national separation was the heart of the Mosaic Covenant. Cleanliness laws were temporal boundary devices that had a covenantal function for as long as the Mosaic Covenant was valid. To enforce them, there had to be a priesthood for the nation of priests. Like the nation of priests, these ordained priests had boundaries placed around them as a separate family (Aaron) in a separate tribe (Levi). It was their task to identify holiness and unholiness, cleanliness and uncleanliness (Lev. 10:10). As we find in the laws governing leprosy, their very physical presence inside the boundary of a house made unclean a house infected with the disease. It was not legally unclean until a priest crossed its boundary. This was analogous to the moral uncleanliness of Canaan, which became judicially unclean -- and subject to God's corporate negative sanctions -- only after the Israelites had crossed the Jordan river and entered the land.
Footnotes:
1. Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1972), pp. 53-57.
2. The Greek word for priest is hierus, as in hierarchy.
3. James B. Jordan, Covenant Sequence in Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 16.
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