Now many pious things are said about the Bible, and God knows you never hear the end from some people about how sacred the Torah is, even though in places it is so thoroughly detestable that just looking into such a cruel and vile Medusa's head is enough to make me almost drop dead on the spot myself. I don't know how numbed out other people might be, but you might try being more shocked than you actually seem to be when you read about some of those stomach turning murderously venomous passages in the Bible.
Yes, the Bible is hardly the work of high, high piety that it was always purported to be, but rather is a composite document composed of the traditions of those groups who were powerful enough at the time of the formation of canon to see to it that their traditions would be included as well. As a solution to the problem of having disparate traditions forced into a document that priests wanted to call the authoritative Word of God was to chop the traditions up and then edit them into a chiastic editing structure. Evidently, such a structure was simply imposed on these traditions by fiat (I would prefer to read complete separate traditions, myself, with no editing job). This also indicates that this editorial decision was imposed on real people, who contributed these traditions, and in the end the editing structure has proved to be to convenient a disguise for preachers and priests throughout the ages for this have to been a mere coincidence.
There are some very strange and unusual documents in the Bible, and certainly one of the least sacred, most worldly, and thus curiously interesting document in the Bible has to be the book of Leviticus.
Now some background about the Levite Priests. According to the law, they received a ten per cent cut of everything. You do understand that this made them one of the most powerful institutions during the glory days of the united Monarchy, and no doubt even after that during the centuries of the divided Kingdoms. In modern terms, assuming that Levites would somehow be able to cut themselves such a lucrative deal, you could understand that the Levitical Priestly system would now be the largest and most powerful mega-multinational corporation on the face of the planet, and probably all said the greatest world power, dwarfing even great and mighty nations like the United States. Well, be serious now, what multinational corporation wouldn't drool at the opportunity to get a ten per cent cut of everything and have it made into a law. Well drool to say the least.
Now the Levites were just as wealthy and powerful in the context of their society in the ancient past as said multinational imagined above would wield power and influence over every single person on the face of the earth. Levites also proved to be shrewd business men who were always ready and willing to exploit an economic opportunity and so show a growth in profits over and above their usual ten per cent of everything. You would think that ten per cent would be enough to make those Levites just rest on their oars, but they proved to be enterprising businessmen who understood well the concept of ‘value added services' as a way to increase revenues further and generate even more profits. These ‘value added services' by the way were also legislated into Law as a strict monopoly for Levites, a sweet sweet business deal to say the very least.
For example, we know from the book of Leviticus that the Levites were heavily invested into the livestock business, and in addition to their usual ten per cent of everything, they also had passed into legislation a Levite monopoly on the value added services provided by the ancient Levite meat processing industry. To put it bluntly the Levites had a complete monopoly on the service end of the meat industry, a fine example of how Levites knew how to exploit an economic opportunity and increase profits.
Now along with their strict monopoly over the meat processing industry came the requirement to establish facilities (temples) and hire and train a labor force (rank and file Levite priests), and given that this was the food service industry we are talking about here, it would also be necessary to instill in the workers in this industry the highest standards of quality control. Now understand something right here. Being a worker in that meat packing plant was hard, filthy, and thoroughly disgusting work. It was basically a slaughter house, alright, and that is where those ordinary Levites worked. The first half of the book of Leviticus basically consists of a workers' inspirational manual for these laborers in the slaughter house, and shows Moses performing the filthy and disgusting tasks of the meat processing industry with gusto and even joy and great zeal. Moses emphasizes craftsmanship and careful attention to detail in these inspirational labor documents, and as you read through this meat packing employee propaganda you will find that the florid holy sounding language that permeates the propaganda is that way simply because actually signing on to be a Levite and do the smelly and disgusting work of a slaughter house employee in a national service industry, well that was disgusting, and to an idealist, looking to be a priest and finding out that this was all his society had to offer him was a job and a book of florid labor propaganda, well they would have to dress that propaganda and spray that turd with as much rose water as possible. That explains what you read when you open Leviticus.
According to Leviticus the Levites also had sidelines going, as a part of their enterprise, and really, when you stop and think about it, while there might be a few verses here and there in Leviticus that someone thinks sounds holy, in general the entire book is a business document, and includes generous amounts of that all important labor propaganda to inspire a hard worked and maybe even disgruntled labor force. Among the sidelines exploited by the Levites was another monopoly and dealing with some truly stubborn and labor intensive problems like fungus, mold and mildew. Doesn't sound to appealing, does it, especially if someone in those days wanted to be a priest for deeply spiritual reasons. You know you really will have to put lots of spiritual spiritual sounding mumbo jumbo in with that meat packing propaganda and mildew cleaning job description to make it come close to being even a little palatable should it be the case that a priest wasn't just looking for a job but actually wanted some spirituality mixed in with it.
Understanding the tremendous wealth and power of the ancient Levite system is vital to understanding that strange labor propaganda we know as the book of Leviticus, and the greed of one small clique of Levites at the top, who claimed to be the top dogs really does put the book of Numbers into a new light. You see according to this book, there were the small group of Levites at the top who called the shots, because they were ‘descendants of Aaron' and the rest of the Levites were conveniently to be hired on at the discretion of these all important Aaronite Levites (see the commentary on the Book of Numbers).
Well, when you consider the amount of money those Levites were looking at, and when you consider how you just cannot run a large service empire in labor intensive industries like those described in Leviticus, without having a large compliant and subordinated work force, and so subordination of the work force turns out to be one the major themes of the book of Numbers. Like I said, understanding the wealth and power of the Levite system is really important to understanding what is really going on in a lot of these manuscripts.