Teaching Team
The Leviticus Challenge
Tags: stoning, Year of Living Biblically
Last year A. J. Jacobs, a Jew who describes himself as Jewish the same way that the Olive Garden is Italian, released a sarcastic and whimsical book about trying to live according to the commandments. Jacobs titled the book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. It describes his year long experiment with the Bible. He set out to follow every rule he could find in the Bible as literally as possible.
His piety was not exactly born of sincere religious conviction. Jacobs is a secular, agnostic, New York journalist who had a good idea for a book. His journal includes plenty of irreverent musing about not wearing clothes of mixed fibers, growing his beard and stoning adulterers. He spent time with fundamentalist groups while trying to exercise hyper-literal interpretations of levitcal purity laws. It seems to mostly be a meditation on how irrelevant he thinks most of the Bible is.
It was Jacobs' book, though, that inspired one evangelical church leader to actually give Leviticus a second look. Pastor Daniel Harrel launched a similar experiment in his church he called "The Thirty Day Levticus Challenge." You can read their story in Christianity Today here.
It is encouraging to see a Christian church taking Torah seriously, even if only for thirty days. Harrel says:
But what would it look like to take Leviticus as seriously as we take the rest of the Bible? For believers in [the LORD], this is no rhetorical question. Inasmuch as we consider the Bible to be God's Word for God's people, we don't have the luxury to pick and choose which parts to heed.
It is interesting to read about Christians voluntarily eating kosher, keeping the Sabbath (or something like the Sabbath) and making other efforts to be Torah observant.
On the other hand, the experiment says more about Christianity than it does about Leviticus. The members who participated in the Leviticus certainly did pick and choose, freely reinterpreted the material and only loosely based their observances on the actual commandments of Leviticus. Sadly, the obvious premise of the experiment was that Leviticus does not, in fact, have real application to Christians in today's world and if one is to profit at all from it, the commandments must be creatively reinterpreted. For example, you might make a tabernacle in your living room out of bed sheets.
If you would like to learn about how the commandments of Torah actually do literally apply to us in the real world today, consider a subscription to Torah Club Volume Five. In Torah Club Five, we explore each one of the traditionally codified 613 commandments of the Torah. It turns out that a lot of those 613 do not apply to us. Several commandments apply only in the land of Israel, others apply only when there is a Temple and priesthood functioning in Jerusalem, some apply only to priests and Levites, some only to men or women. Then again, there are a good deal more that do apply than you might expect. Torah Club Five can be your guide to real biblical living. You might not have the same amusing results that A. J. Jacobs did, but it will last longer than a year and certainly longer than thirty days.
D. Thomas Lancaster
25 Tammuz, 5768
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Visitor Feedback:
I read the article you are talking about in Christianity Today and although it was only for 30 days that the pastor of that church and some of it's members actually "tried" to live according to Leviticus, I did read how it changed each of their lives. Even though they may not have done everything according to what most people in the Hebraic roots movement deem correct, I do think it is admirable that they even tried. I do believe that God will take what they have done and turn it to his good. There was one woman who had started observing the Sabbath and was going to continue doing so. In short my opinion is this, even though they did not do everything to how you or I would, by doing what they did, they will probably go searching exactly what each thing means. I don't doubt that each one came away from the experience changed in one way or another. When you started searching and obeying the instructions in Leviticus did you do everything correctly??? I would guess not, nor did I.
Sara | July 29, 2008 12:23 PM
Thank you for the link.
I enjoyed reading "The 30-Day Leviticus Challenge."
I agree that it says more about Christianity than it does about Leviticus...and as with any 'blog,' the comments posted about the article say even more.
Crispin | July 29, 2008 2:15 PM