And all the things in the Levitical system that render someone ritually impure
are things that are unavoidable in life.
They're not designed to teach the Israelites anything about how awful they are.
They're designed to teach the Israelites how human they are,
and how other, non-human, how above human God is.
Leviticus 16 we associate with the Day of Atonement.
Because that is the chapter where the ritual ceremony is laid out and provided.
Leviticus 16, verse 8. Again, we're familiar with the fact that Aaron
is told to pick two goats and cast lots over the two goats.
So we've got two goats. Aaron cast lots over them;
one of the goats, and if you did the reading for today, this is going to be familiar.
Or if you just read Leviticus 16.
One lot falls on a goat and then that goat is for the Lord. For Yahweh.
Hebrew I have in yellow here, the preposition Lamed, plus the name Yahweh.
The other goat is Lamed, and then another name. This goat is for Azazel.
And scholars have wondered for quite some time what in the world is going on here?
Now in Unseen Realm, and I'll give you resources to other sources about this,
Azazel was a demon, not just in later Judaism, but he is a deity,
to an Israelite mind, demonic figure of the wilderness.
He's a wilderness entity, a god, a deity associated with the wilderness.
He's not Yahweh. The wilderness is his domain. It's the bad place.
It's the anti-Eden. The Wilderness is not where Yahweh is.
Yahweh is leading us through the wilderness to his land, to the land he is giving us.
To the New Eden, the land that flows with milk and honey.
But we're here in the wilderness. And we have these instructions for Leviticus 16.
And we have these two goats. One of them is for Yahweh,
and the other one is for Azazel.
This has raised the question; well, is this a sacrifice,
like you have God telling the Israelites to sacrifice a goat to a different god?
No. If you actually look through and read Leviticus 16, only one of the goats is sacrificed.
There's one goat that is sacrificed to Yahweh.
The blood of that goat is applied to the structure of the tabernacle,
it's sprinkled on the mercy seat where the Ark of the Covenant is.
This is the Day of Atonement.
It actually has nothing to do with the forgiveness of any individual sins.
What this does, and again, we did a whole podcast series on the Book of Leviticus,
you can listen to Leviticus 16. And really Leviticus 1 through about 7.
The sacrifices there. The blood is never applied to people.
Only two exceptions where blood is applied to people.
And they have to do with the priesthood,
sanctifying the priesthood because they will occupy sacred space,
and perform various rituals to protect Yahweh's turf.
To protect sacred space from defilement.
And allow access to worshipers and people who bring offerings.
The offerings are consistently about purging, cleansing, sacred space,
so that the people are accepted into sacred space or at least
on to some part of sacred space to bring their offering,
regardless of whatever kind of offering it is.
So the blood of the one goat is applied to the tabernacle itself.
I like to compare the Day of Atonement
to hitting the reboot button on your computer, because that's exactly what it did.
It resets the tabernacle. You did this once a year.
It resets the tabernacle to its original pristine conditions
so that it can be used for another year. It's a reboot. It's a do-over.
It's a renewal of the starting point. It's about sacred space.
It's not about people, the blood is never applied to people.
Now the second goat, what is that? That is not sacrificed.
We don't have an offering sacrificed to some foreign god.
What the priest does with it is he lays his hands on the head of the second goat,
and he symbolically transfers the sins of the impurities,
everything that would defile sacred space, it'd be an offense to Yahweh,
is transferred to the head of the goat, and then the goat is sent off where?
Into the wilderness, to Azazel. What's the logic?
Well, this is where sin belongs. This is where impurity belongs.
It doesn't belong in the camp of Yahweh. Much less sacred space.
I mean, it doesn't belong anywhere here, in Yahweh's people,
because you always people themselves are sanctified,
they are set apart from other peoples.
They're not to worship other gods, obviously. But they even have their own land.
Okay, they're completely separate. they're to be a kingdom of priests
and a holy, a set-apart nation.
So once a year, we're going to hit the reboot button.
And we're going to send all of the impurities, all the things that are anti-Eden,
back to anti-Eden. Because Eden, the camp, the holy company,
the Holy Family, God's domain needs to be purified.
And we reset the tabernacle so that as we go, and people become ritually impure
by maybe they touch a dead carcass or a woman in her menstrual cycle.
I mean, we could talk about all these things, and what the logic is.
None of those things have to do with moral failure or moral impurities.
They're not sins, okay? What they are,
is there are things that happen to people that render them ritually impure.
And all the things in the Levitical system that render someone ritually impure
are things that are unavoidable in life.
They're not designed to teach the Israelites anything about how awful they are.
They're designed to teach the Israelites how human they are,
and how other, non-human, how above human God is.
This is the point. This is the logic of the system.
You know, we've sort of read New Testament,
forgiveness and sacrifice of Jesus terminology back into the Old Testament,
and therefore we don't understand what's going on here.
What we should do is understand what's going on here
and then read that into New Testament material.
Typically isn't what happens, we do the reverse. And it creates a lot of confusion.
This isn't a class session on the priesthood and the sacrificial system.
But again, we're getting into this a little bit here,
just in sort of the most dramatic example here with the Day of Atonement.
You put impurity and sin and defilement,
whatever label you want to put on it, everything that is anti-Eden.
You cleanse the sacred space. You reboot the community,
and you take all that stuff that is incompatible with the presence of God,
and you put it out there because that's where it belongs.