Sunday Sermonette: Gore, gore and more gore

You may have thought that we're done with the descriptions of killing animals, spilling their blood, carving them up, and burning their innards. Nope. Now that the priests have been ordained, they need to get to work. And that means more of the mind numbingly repetitious recitation of the details of the procedure. Note that the Hebrews have been sacrificing animals since Abel, but up to now it's been informal. There wasn't any priesthood and the people would just do it themselves. It was mentioned occasionally in Genesis and Exodus, usually for special occasions, and the details of the procedure were not spelled out. So what's new here is the formalization and ritualization, the priestly monopoly over the practice, and the command that it be done regularly.

In fact this must have been a gradual process. Somehow some men became specialists in sacrifice and assumed the priestly role. They managed to persuade everybody that this is what God wanted. The emergence of a priesthood was pretty much a universal of human civilization, alongside a class of warrior aristocrats. In this telling, the kings have yet to appear but the 12 tribes do have their patriarchs, although they go largely unmentioned in this part of the narrative. The historical pattern generally was an alliance between the priests and kings, and I imagine that is what happened in fact with the Israelites as well. Note that Jacob was a nascent King, but the political development of the Israelites was interrupted by the (fictitious) Egyptian captivity, and Moses stepped in to assume a combined head priest/secular ruler role. However, he does not become a dynastic founder. How the Israelite society really formed we will likely never know precisely, but it certainly wasn't like this.

9 On the eighth day Moses summoned Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel. ² He said to Aaron, “Take a bull calf for your sin offering^[a] and a ram for your burnt offering, both without defect, and present them before the Lord. ³ Then say to the Israelites: ‘Take a male goat for a sin offering, a calf and a lamb—both a year old and without defect—for a burnt offering, ⁴ and an ox^[b] and a ram for a fellowship offering to sacrifice before the Lord, together with a grain offering mixed with olive oil. For today the Lord will appear to you.’”

⁵ They took the things Moses commanded to the front of the tent of meeting, and the entire assembly came near and stood before the Lord. ⁶ Then Moses said, “This is what the Lord has commanded you to do, so that the glory of the Lord may appear to you.”
⁷ Moses said to Aaron, “Come to the altar and sacrifice your sin offering and your burnt offering and make atonement for yourself and the people; sacrifice the offering that is for the people and make atonement for them, as the Lord has commanded.”
⁸ So Aaron came to the altar and slaughtered the calf as a sin offering for himself. ⁹ His sons brought the blood to him, and he dipped his finger into the blood and put it on the horns of the altar; the rest of the blood he poured out at the base of the altar. ¹⁰ On the altar he burned the fat, the kidneys and the long lobe of the liver from the sin offering, as the Lord commanded Moses; ¹¹ the flesh and the hide he burned up outside the camp.
¹² Then he slaughtered the burnt offering. His sons handed him the blood, and he splashed it against the sides of the altar. ¹³ They handed him the burnt offering piece by piece, including the head, and he burned them on the altar. ¹⁴ He washed the internal organs and the legs and burned them on top of the burnt offering on the altar.
¹⁵ Aaron then brought the offering that was for the people. He took the goat for the people’s sin offering and slaughtered it and offered it for a sin offering as he did with the first one.
¹⁶ He brought the burnt offering and offered it in the prescribed way. ¹⁷ He also brought the grain offering, took a handful of it and burned it on the altar in addition to the morning’s burnt offering.
¹⁸ He slaughtered the ox and the ram as the fellowship offering for the people. His sons handed him the blood, and he splashed it against the sides of the altar. ¹⁹ But the fat portions of the ox and the ram—the fat tail, the layer of fat, the kidneys and the long lobe of the liver— ²⁰ these they laid on the breasts, and then Aaron burned the fat on the altar. ²¹ Aaron waved the breasts and the right thigh before the Lord as a wave offering, as Moses commanded.
²² Then Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them. And having sacrificed the sin offering, the burnt offering and the fellowship offering, he stepped down.
²³ Moses and Aaron then went into the tent of meeting. When they came out, they blessed the people; and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. ²⁴ Fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat portions on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell facedown.

Exactly what the "Glory of the Lord" consisted of is never described. In Exodus, you may recall a gigantic human figure standing on a sapphire floor, but all the people could see were his feet. Moses was given the privilege of seeing his buttocks. Sometimes he appears as smoke or fire. Here he produces fire that burns the offering, but of course Aaron has already burned it in verse 20 so this contradicts what has already happened just a moment earlier. In any event, God gradually becomes more and more abstract, from walking in the Garden of Eden and consorting personally with Abraham and Lot, to appearing as a burning bush and then showing only glimpses of his physical body, to now appearing as undefined "glory." How he speaks to Moses is unclear, but evidently just as a voice in Moses's head. (In Numbers 7, Moses hears God speaking from between the cherubim above the ark of the covenant. Whether this is the usual way is not stated, however.) Going forward, God's  physical presence will continue to fade.

Footnotes:

1. Leviticus 9:2 Or purification offering; here and throughout this chapter
2. Leviticus 9:4 The Hebrew word can refer to either male or female; also in verses 18 and 19.