Leviticus, Deconstruction and The Body: by Francis Landy, University of Alberta
Leviticus, Deconstruction and The Body: by Francis Landy, University of Alberta
Leviticus, Deconstruction and The Body: by Francis Landy, University of Alberta
a5
by
Francis Landy,
University of Alberta
1. Introduction
1.1. Let us call deconstruction the practice of resistance to totalizing discourses, to the desire for
coherence and sense, the attribution of words to a master program that unbinds, disaffiliates, as it
juggles and congeals, and let us call feminism the practice of resistance to totalizing hierarchies, an
attention to the disenfranchised other, the libidinal voice, face that calls the text to an encounter ever
dissimulated, and the body, that discordant, wretched body, body of the text, of the rose …gurgles
1.2. And the Bible, we mustn't forget the hoary Bible, whose sexual proclivities are surely its business,
was there ever a time when its locks hung heavy with dew, outside the door of the Beloved? Yet it
has its lovers, greedy for its flesh, or its penis. Oh the pathos of old men, the aged hierarchs, in the
garden of Susanna.
2. Leviticus as Pornography
2.1. Last term I had the privilege of teaching a course on Leviticus, one of those courses in which I knew
much less than my students. Leviticus, a constructed text if ever there was one, an imagination,
imaginaire, of an ideal changeless social and sacred order, about the maintenance of the clean and
proper body of man and woman, Israel and God, and a text about the transactions and processes of
the body. One student wrote about Leviticus as pornography, in comparison with Ezekiel. For him,
the chapters on sexual transgression homologised women with the forbidden world of idolatry (an
argument rather similar to Robert Carroll's)2; he was interested by the absence of Ezekiel's
excremental fantasy in Leviticus, except in the pornoprophetic chapter 26, and its replacement by
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imagery of annihilation. I did not agree with the simple reduction of women to idolatry; the chapters
spend too much of their time imagining illicit sexual behaviour (and, of course, attributing it to the
demonised other, Egypt and Canaan). Imagining deviance represents desire, a desire projected
outward and proscribed, but assumed to be ever-present and insidious. Look at the piling up of terms
of reprobation: hmz, hb(wt, lbt, dsx, hdn.3 Why all the excitement? And what is its obverse?
Is it jouissance, as Kristeva suggests in her discussion of abjection?4 It may be terror at the loss of
boundaries, interfamilial, inter-species, across genders, the loss of self. The self, like the life force,
the #$pn, is always leaking. The attraction and peril of the other side can be felt most insistently
when the text switches subject position. For instance, in 20.18, it tells us, tautologously, that “she
(the menstruant) has uncovered the source of her blood” (hymd rwqm t) htlg )yhw).5 Why
evoke the subjectivity of the woman? Or her agency? Is it for the sake of the striptease, identification
with the object of the gaze as a means of annulling the gaze? What is exposed, however, is not her
body but her blood, turning her inside out. The gaze perhaps recoils at the sight, or revels in it - they
both seem to be scrabbling to take off her clothes, and the man does lie with her. Is it a desire for the
blood, the impure female blood, that escapes from its enclosure, and threatens to overwhelm, to
engulf the penis? There is the curious juxtaposition of the purificatory, life-giving metaphor of
“source”, rwqm, and blood, the contaminating waste product of reproduction. Richard Whitekettle
persuasively argues that the womb in Leviticus corresponds to the waters of chaos in Genesis 1.2,
which have to be contained for creation to unfold.6 The feminine principle then seems antonymic to
God. This, as we shall see, is too simple. The man at any rate seems to be in touch with, to feast upon
her essence, the source of her blood; sperm and uterine blood are an explosive mixture. But he does
so through her eyes, imagining his, stripping for his delectation, being turned on by his pleasure.
Pleasure feasts on pleasure. Is this a masculine fantasy? Indeed. His own nakedness, self-exposure, is
so carefully occluded. The male is left intact, immune from exposure.7 But it may respond to,
recognize, her own experience; at the very least it posits it, as a counterpoise to the dominant rhetoric
of the book. We can imagine her exhibitionist pleasure, and his voyeurist delight, infused with that of
the book, which seeks to render its fascination, its nakedness, invisible. The erasure to which they are
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both consigned (“they shall be cut off from their people”)8 maintains the couple’s (or text’s)
jouissance outside history and society, in a perhaps secretly indulged forbidden archive.
2.2. The insistent imagery, “uncovering nakedness” (hwr( hlg),9 “kinship flesh” (r)#$) etc. suggests a
desire to perceive , along with the desire for intercourse, and a primal identification - the unity of
kinship becoming the union of flesh. What is concealed? Perhaps our bare humanity/animality. The
woman who draws near (brqt) to the beast, the opposite of the sacrificial exploitation of animals,
through bringing them near (brq) to the altar.10 Uncovering nakedness recalls the innocent
nakedness of Genesis 2, and the quasi-incest of the first couple. Eden then is identified with Canaan
and Egypt, the lands said to engage in forbidden practices (Lev.18.2, 27, 20.23-24). The ideal world
of Leviticus then supercedes and represses the primordial one - hence its insecurity. We are close to
the “feminist discourse on embodiment” as well as the polymorphous sexual imagination of the Song
of Songs.
3.1. Another essay, very polished, dealt with the land, the female complement or partner of God, in which
he is immanent. The land is the object of care throughout the book, and the image, the foundation, of
its coherence: Israel's dwelling in the land is the condition for God's indwelling and for the social and
literary structure that makes it possible. It is an ideal vision of the future. Except that the future is
already foreclosed. Even before arrival, we imagine exile. The book is reft with intimations of
failure. From the death of Nadab and Abihu to the threat or prediction that the land will vomit you
out to the culminating apocalypse, there is no doubt that the world of Leviticus will not happen. It is
thus a self-negating book, one which posits a world that will never happen. Remarkably, unlike
Deuteronomy, it leaves us outside the land.11 There is no return. God remembers his covenant with
the ancestors, the term “covenant” recalling the “eternal covenant of salt” (Mlw( xlm tyrb) at
the beginning (2.14).12 And what does this mean? God hugging the ancestral ghostly phallus, that
symbol of patrilineage, in its absence, and remembering the land. There is the arousal, especially
given the homonymity of “remember” and “male,” and the anticipation that God will insert the
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spectral penis into the land, but for the moment it is waste, and this waste is apparently its Sabbath,
its homeostasis, the Sabbath that is the equivalent of the now desolate holy place.13
3.2. The word for memory, rkz, occurs also as the “memorial portion,” htrkza, that together with the
entire complement of incense, is offered up with the meal-offering in chapter 2.14 God is aroused by
the fragrance (xwxn xyr) of incense and wheat. Intertextually, the incense reminds one of the Song
of Songs, and the “heap of wheat, hedged with lilies,” to which the woman's belly is compared there
(7.3). What is remembered, and what is its relationship with masculinity, the logos that speaks
throughout the book and whose world, and land, it projects/protects? The sensuality of the book is
overtly alimentary, the sacrifices are the “food” of God (Lev.22.8 etc.), but what about the other
4. The Blasphemer
4.1. Another student wrote about the narratives that disturb the serenity of Leviticus, namely chapters 10
(the deaths of Nadab and Abihu) and 24 (the blasphemer). I will look at the second of these.
Narrative, presupposing contingency and crisis, subverts the program of Leviticus, according to
which nothing ever changes. The narrative of chapter 24, so brief, so enigmatic, apparently
superogatory, challenges the entire social and literary structure of the book. Two men fight: fighting
encapsulates the violence that may or will destroy society. Two men fighting is a motif, an
emblematic scene, throughout the Pentateuch.16 One of them is the son of an Egyptian man and an
br br(, the punningly designated “mixed multitude” that went up with Israel (Exod.12.38),17 and
hence of the hybridity Leviticus resolutely condemns.18 He gives the lie to the pure and proper body
of Israel. During the fight the man curses the “name”; as the student who wrote on pornography
pointed out, the word for “curse,” bqn, is the root of hbqn, “female,” and suggests an invagination,
a hollowing out, of the name of God. Desecration of the name and its derivatives, such as the priestly
patrilineage in 22.9, is the most heinous of offences, the root offence, in Leviticus, and its
ramifications could lead us a merry dance. If the whole book is the working out of the name, the
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language, of God, as suggested for instance by the metaphoric formula ‘h yn), “I am YHWH,” then
4.2. Nothing restores it, though God carries on as if nothing had happened. Two solutions are attempted.
One is rhetorical. God is consulted, and after decreeing execution, proceeds to an apparently
irrelevant trotting out of the talionic formula. Here a fantasy of dismemberment is overlaid by
assertion of reciprocity. The second is the narrative account of the fate of the recreant, who is taken
outside the camp and stoned, after the witnesses have laid their hands on him. The ceremonial
obviously corresponds to the expulsion of the scapegoat in Leviticus 16 and to the disposal of the
ashes of the sin-offerings outside the camp. It is also an inversion of the sacrificial ritual, in which
the donor or confessor places his hand on the animal before the divine altar. The victim is removed
from the camp, the microcosm of social order, and the sacred fire at its centre; there he is crushed,
bruised, smashed, rendered unrecognisable as human, by the stones which configure the earth, and,
4.3. Here we come to the essential ambiguity, also pointed out by this student. For God is the God of the
desert as well as the God of the camp, domesticated at the heart of society. He is in the subject
position of Azazel, as well as its antithesis. This is shown, for instance, by the series of dizzying puns
on the word for “goat,” ry(#: Edom, whirlwind, terror, hair, all of which are more or less
associated with the theophany.19 God is both outside as well as inside the camp, identified with chaos
as well as creation. The desert symbolises non-life in the Pentateuch. The book inserts itself between
and holds apart the two aspects of God, preventing their destructive conjunction. But it also
anticipates the transformation of the land into the desert, its anti-Sabbath.
5. Concluding Reflections
5.1. I have engaged with these three students' interpretations, responsively, reworking them through my
deconstructive interpretation among others. All three fit or involve both deconstructive and feminist
discourses, inevitably. Because the one cannot go without the other. I distrust any insinuation that
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there is such a thing as “pure” deconstruction or “pure” feminism, a clean and proper ideological
paradise. Deconstructing Leviticus means in part recovering the woman's voice in it, and whatever
else it stands for. Paying attention to the marginalization, projection, and abjection of women in the
text is part of the resistance to its controlling discourse, his master's voice. Deconstruction and
feminism do not overlap entirely, however. Feminism, to begin with, has a particular political profile,
which deconstruction might well treat as being outside its purview. The text, moreover, has complex
allegiances. The world it imagines corresponds partially to the feminist program in its resistance to
political hierarchies. It is a world without a king, without politics, controlling elites, or long term
accumulations of capital (if one excludes the anomalous cities).20 According to Milgrom, it is a world
without slavery, at least for Israelites.21 Yet this is part of its coherence, its sense.
5.2. Finally, what about embodiment? Leviticus lives in the minds and behaviours perhaps of its
interpreters, in the voices of its performers, and it is a ghost of a book, whose true incarnation would
have been in the bodies of sacrificial animals, the satisfaction of the gleaners, the life and guts of the
society that would live by it. More than any other book of the Bible, perhaps, it is a discourse of the
body. Yet perhaps, more than any other book, it conforms to the stereotype of male = spirit, logos,
and female = body, which needs to be controlled. Nancy Jay postulates that sacrificial cults are
patrilineal cults, which perpetuate thereby the myth of pure sacred male descent.22 Leviticus is an
almost perfect example of this. It is one, however, that is always breaking down. It is at this point
ENDNOTES
1
Thanks are due to Skye Wylie, Piotr Bobkowski, and Robert Simpson, for the stimulus
they provided for this paper, which was a contribution to a panel discussion on the “The
Bible, The Body and Feminism” at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies meeting in
Sherbrooke, Quebec, in June 1999. A version of the paper appeared on the CSBS
Prophets (The Feminist Companion to the Bible 8; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
chapters of some of the prophets are explicitly metaphors, and no different in principle
from similar representations of men, animals, and plants. It is evident that this is not the
Additional Reflections” JSOT 70 (1996), pp.63-86. There is, however, much common
meaning, however, remains totally obscure. hmz characterizes the relationship of a man,
mother and daughter or granddaughter in 18.17 and 20.14, as well as the promiscuous
priest’s daughter in 19.29. Frymer-Kensky thinks that it refers to incest outside blood-
kinship relations (Tikva Frymer_Kensky, “Law and Philosophy: The Case of Sex in the
Bible” Semeia 45 p.101 n.15, rep. in Alice Bach [ed.] Women in the Hebrew Bible, p.15).
hb(wt is used for homosexual intercourse in 18.22 and 20.13, and is a general term for
8
the entire code of sexual malpractice and the child sacrifice associated with it in 18.26,
27, 29, and 30, suggesting homosexual intercourse is the paradigmatic infraction. lbt is
used for intercourse with animals in 18.23, and with a man’s daughter-in-law in 20.12; it
is clearly derived from llb, “mix”, corresponding to Leviticus’s general anxiety about
miscegenation. The connection between intercourse with animals and with a daughter-in-
law is not evident. dsx only occurs in 20.17, the prohibition against intercourse with a
half-sister. The homonymity with the familiar dsx, “lovingkindness, loyalty” (etc.), is
describes a relationship with a sister-in-law in 20.21, as well as being the normal term for
the state of separation of a menstruant and parturient woman. Again the metaphorical
Indiana University P., 1990), pp.183-84, suggests that the association is with the
childlessness consequent on the offence; this, however, begs the question. The standard
commentaries are not helpful in explicating these terms. Calum M. Carmichael Law,
Legend and Incest in the Bible: Leviticus 18-20 (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1997) detects in the
terms allusions to patriarchal narratives. For instance, hdn correlates menstruation with
Onan’s spillage of seed in 38.9 (p.173). Carmichael is not always very consistent,
is emphasised throughout Powers of Horror (tr. Leon S. Roudiez; New York: Columbia
9
U.P., 1982), for instance, pp.9-10, 210, as well as, using different terms, Kristeva’s other
between the two verses emphasises that the significance of the blood is determinative in
this instance.
8
The literature on the penalty of karet is vast. For a summary of views, see Jacob
Milgrom, Numbers (JPS Torah Commentary 4; Philadelphia and New York: Jewish
Publication Society, 1990), pp.405-408, and Leviticus 1-16 (AB 3; New York:
Doubleday, 1991), pp.457-460. See also Baruch Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah
Commentary 3; Philadelphia and New York, 1989), pp.241-42. Jean Soler, “The Dietary
Prohibitions of the Hebrews” New York Review of Books, June 14th 1979, p.25 argues that
Monotheism (Boston: Beacon, 1994), p.91, argues that the narratives of the Garden of
Eden and Noah depict the prohibition of nakedness as a “foundational moment”“ in the
emergence of human culture. This might explain why the uncovering of nakedness
10
In a wonderful discussion of how the poetics of Leviticus is embodied through its
rhythms and primary images, Franziska Bark, ‘Listen your way in with your mouth’”: A
“drawing near” (brq)) pervades the book, suggesting an approach to God that is never
quite completed. The approach to the animal would be the converse of the approach to
God of the book's dominant program; and as with it, the verb suggests a process of
“The Forbidden Animals in Leviticus” JSOT 59 (1993), pp.3-23, regards it as the “latch”
of the book (p.11), while Christopher R. Smith, “The Literary Structure of Leviticus”
JSOT 70 (1996), p.30, holds that it intentionally mitigates the impact of ch.26. In fact,
Leviticus posits three endings: the two alternatives of ch.26 and the conclusion in ch.27.
However, the commination of 26.14-46 is clearly the culmination of the main historical
of the shewbread.
13
David Damrosch comments on the “rich prophetic irony” of the term in this passage
[San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987], p.292). The equivalence between the Sabbath
and the sanctuary is established in 19.30 and 26.2. Israel Knohl sees this equivalence as
11
being of central concern to the Holiness Code (The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly
poor person’s hattat offering in 5.12, where, however, it does not include incense, since it
is a sin offering. A comparable case is that of the sotah in Num.5.26. The word is also
used to describe the shewbread in 24.7, even though they are not offered, reinforcing the
Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1997) to non-visual senses in the Hebrew Bible
(“Wine, Women, and Death,” pp.166-209), though she does not mention Leviticus.
16
The motif occurs in Ex.2.13, 21.22, and Deut.25.11-12, as well as our incident. The
three legal cases have strong structural connections: in each case, the fight is correlated
generative organs, and with bodily mutilation. The theory that the sacrificial system
displaces the violence inherent in society is primarily associated with René Girard (e.g.
Violence and the Sacred [Baltimore: John Hopkins U.P, 1977]). Girard’s thesis is clearly
violence is one of the destructive forces whose presence can be detected throughout the
book, e.g. in the prohibition of vengeance in 19.18, and of standing by the “blood of your
neighbour” in 19.16.
17
The br br(ocan always be relied upon to blamed for any mischance to befall the
Israelites. See Num.11.4, where the word used is Psps). Levine, Leviticus, p.166, holds
12
that the blasphemer is further tarnished by his Danite ancestry, since the Danites are
significance of the mother’s lineage (Leviticus [tr. Douglas Scott; OTL; Louisville:
confusion was most persuasively promoted by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger
(London: RKP, 1966), and has been the subject of much refinement and critique since,
not least by Mary Douglas herself. In her most recent work, such as “The Forbidden
emerging from the lands of the south (Teman and Paran). Associations with the
whirlwind are also frequent cf. II Kings 2.1, 11, Ps.148.8, Job.38.1, 40.6. There are no
representations of divine hair before Daniel 7.9, but untrimmed hair is one of the
conditions for the maintenance of the sanctity of the Nazirite (Num.6.5). Nazirites, who
symmetrically opposed to the high priest, whose hair must not be allowed to become
has recently argued that the legislation of Lev.25 served the interests of the Jerusalem
priestly elite. Gottwald presupposes that all literature and legislation is reducible to class
interests. Contrary points of view are presented by Knohl, who holds that the Holiness
Code is the priestly response to the ethical challenge of the eighth-century prophets (The
13
Sanctuary of Silence, pp.199-224) and Robert Kugler, “Holiness, Purity, the Body and
Society: The Evidence for Theological Conflict in Leviticus” JSOT 76 (1997), pp.3-27,
who argues that the Holiness Code is a lay composition which does not especially serve
the interests of priests. See also Bernard Harrison, “The Strangeness of Leviticus”
Leviticus with the individualistic morality of the Enlightenment, itself a version of the
Pauline stress on individual salvation, and argues that this difference is one of the bases
(Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1995), p.69. Of course, non-Israelites may still be enslaved
(25.44-46). See also “Leviticus 25 and Some Postulates of the Jubilee” in The Jubilee
Challenge, p. 30. Adrian Schenker, “The Biblical Legislation on the Release of Slaves:
The Road from Exodus to Leviticus” JSOT 78 (1998), pp. 23-41, argues that the
Chicago U.P.1992). Curiously, Jay’s discussion of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible focusses
entirely on the patriarchal narratives. For an interesting critique of Jay, see Ivan Strensky,
“Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90s” RSR 22 (1996), pp. 13-17.