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Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics is unavailable, but you can change that!

Values are what Leviticus is all about. They pervade every chapter and almost every verse. Underlying the rituals, careful readers will find an intricate web of values that purports to model how we should relate to God and to each other. Ritual is the poetry of religion that leads us to a moment of transcendence. When a ritual fails because it either lacks content, or is misleading, it loses its...

tithe to grain (barley and wheat), must (fresh wine), and oil (olive), whereas Leviticus imposes the tithe on all produce and animals. How can these flatly contradictory tithe laws be ascribed to one author, Moses? I turn to a rabbinic story: Moses (in heaven) requested of God to visit R. Akiba’s academy. Permission was granted. He sat down in the back and listened to R. Akiba exposit a law purportedly based on the Torah. Moses didn’t understand a word; “his energy flagged.” At the end of R. Akiba’s
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