Leviticus (Antioch Bible)

Weatherford, TX: The Cutting Horse Press, 2022

This translation of Leviticus completes my translation of the books of the Torah and follows a similar approach to my other translations. My priority was always to express the ideas in the text in the most natural way in English, and at the same time to capture the energy and rhythm of the original Hebrew. One unique aspect of all my translations is that they jettison the traditional chapter divisions and instead organize the material according to the Masoretic parashot. Organizing the text in this way, I believe, gets us closer to the ancient writers, and yields numerous insights into their composition approach. The commentary accompanying the translation focuses on issues of translation, language, and composition history. After the commentary I provide an essay that summarizes my (necessarily speculative) views on the composition history of Leviticus. In that essay, I assign each of the parashot to one of the five major compositional stages that I identify, which span a period of some 700 years, from the turn of the second millennium BCE to the late fourth century BCE. In my treatment of the composition history, I make a number of unusual proposals. Specifically, I argue (1) that the core of Leviticus consists of eleven ancient cult “rule books” from the northern kingdom and the province of Samaria, (2) that these ancient rule books were brought together with little change into a stand-alone document (a “proto-Leviticus”) by priests in Yahweh's cult at Mount Gerizim in the fifth century BCE, and (3) that this proto-Leviticus was included with the books of the Torah and supplemented and revised in the subsequent one-and-a-half centuries through the collaborative efforts of Yahweh's priesthoods in Mount Gerizim and Jerusalem, resulting in the version of Leviticus that we have today. For those who prefer physical copies of books, the print edition of this book is available at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733441581/

Additional Notes on Leviticus, 2023

In the 800-page Leviticus ZECOT commentary, I focused on what MUST be said to understand the text. In the Additional Notes on Leviticus book, I focus on what else COULD be said. In these 220 pages you will find: • further interaction with the secondary literature, expanding on discussions in the commentary • even more detail on points of Hebrew grammar, from beginner to advanced • further bibliographical information. You can download a pdf for free here. For those wanting a hard copy, purchases may be made at Amazon.

The Text of Leviticus, OBO 292, 2020

2003

There are a few moments in scholarship when one should stop, step back, and just look on in wonderment. The completion of Milgrom's monumental Leviticus commentary in the Anchor Bible series is one of those moments. While I will

2003

There are a few moments in scholarship when one should stop, step back, and just look on in wonderment. The completion of Milgrom's monumental Leviticus commentary in the Anchor Bible series is one of those moments. While I will

James Watts uses rhetorical analysis for this detailed exposition of Leviticus 1-10. In dialogue with a wide variety of contemporary scholarship on Leviticus, this commentary also engages the history of the book’s interpretation and the history of Jewish and Christian ritual practices. Leviticus’s rhetoric aimed to persuade ancient Israelites to make offerings to God. It legitimized the monopoly of Aaronide priests over Israel’s offerings and over determining correct ritual practice. The priests in turn established the Torah containing Leviticus as the authoritative text of Israel’s religion. Rhetorical analysis of Leviticus thus leads to new insights into the role of priests in raising the Pentateuch to the status of scripture and in shaping the biblical canon. It also calls attention to the role of ritual rhetoric in the polities of later Jewish and Christian groups, despite the fact that neither religion makes animal offerings as Leviticus 1-10 mandates.

This is a handy summary of features for the text of Leviticus in the Septuagint, for easy consultation by both Septuagint experts and biblical scholars or students more generally.

Themelios 46.3, 2021

Christians have long wrestled with how to read the Law in light of the work of Christ. Focusing on Leviticus, this article defends a proposal for its structure and leverages this as a starting point for reading its laws in light of Christ. The resulting approach considers laws in terms of (1) the purpose of the overarching section to which they belong and (2) how they are expressed in terms of old covenant realities. This provides the tools for nuanced consideration of the degree and manner of how these laws continue to be relevant to daily life in Christ.

Septuagint Commentary Series. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019

In Leviticus, Awabdy offers the first commentary on the Greek version of Leviticus according to Codex Vaticanus (4th century CE), which binds the Old and New Testaments into a single volume as Christian scripture. Distinct from other LXX Leviticus commentaries that employ a critical edition and focus on translation technique, Greco-Roman context and reception, this study interprets a single Greek manuscript on its own terms in solidarity with its early Byzantine users unversed in Hebrew. With a formal-equivalence English translation of a new, uncorrected edition, Awabdy illuminates Leueitikon in B as an aesthetic composition that not only exhibits inherited Hebraic syntax and Koine lexical forms, but its own structure and theology, paragraph (outdented) divisions, syntax and pragmatics, intertextuality, solecisms and textual variants. For an interview about this Leviticus LXX volume by William A. Ross on his blog, Septuaginta & C.: https://williamaross.com/2020/08/10/new-sept-volume-on-leviticus-an-interview-with-mark-awabdy/