“Realistic” and “Revisionist” Approaches

Broadly speaking, critical scholarship of Leviticus tends to follow one of two approaches:

1. Most scholars opt for what is called the “realistic” approach. Levine explains, “We consider the text of Leviticus to be a source of evidence of the actual practice of religion” (Levine, Leviticus, xxi). Those who support the traditional view of Mosaic authorship usually share this presupposition. The traditional view tends to make little distinction between the “world of the text” (i.e., the history narrated by the biblical texts) and the “world behind the text” (i.e., the historical events that gave rise to its composition and redaction), while the critical approach takes for granted the distinction between the two worlds and tends to focus on analyzing the latter.

1. The “revisionist” approach sees Leviticus as a literary creation of a much later period than the events it narrates. Supporters of this view include Lamche, Thompson, Davies, and Whitelam (see Barr, History and Ideology, 59–101). Carmichael maintains that the laws of Leviticus are fictitious, derived from the biblical narrative that runs from Genesis to Kings. He argues that these laws are not “the product of the real-life experiences of later Israelites” but rather a literary creation that grew out of the “incidents in biblical narratives” (Carmichael, Illuminating Leviticus, viii, 161; for a critique of this view, see Milgrom, Leviticus, 17–22, 1591–93).