means to that end. It follows that the many modern scholars who speak of P as essentially legalistic or as glorifying the law misrepresent this document. P’s main concern is not law but the divine presence that observance of the law makes possible.”20 All the regulations about ritual purity and offerings, then, actually purport to maintain what modern religious people might call Israel’s “relationship with God.” In other words, the ritual purity system was, within the world that Israel’s priests