Spirits were high after Moses and the Hebrew people’s dramatic escape from Egypt in Exodus 14 and 15, but it doesn’t take long for things to come to a sudden halt — both for those journeying as well as for us as readers! There have likely been countless attempts to read through the Bible that have ended in Leviticus and Numbers — books that are rich in their own way but that lack the sustained narratives and complex figures that make Genesis and Exodus so captivating.

Instead, the vast majority of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy is trying to accomplish something else: establishing a divinely instituted series of laws and norms meant to help govern the land the Hebrew people will eventually enter. These commandments (mitzvot in Hebrew) are certainly best known from the list of 10 shared in Exodus 20, but there will ultimately be 613 of these commandments issued within these first five books of the Bible, which came to be known both as the Torah (“instruction” in Hebrew) as well as the Pentateuch (“five books” in Greek).

After spending a great deal of time on many of the foundational stories of Genesis and Exodus in our early weeks, our time with these remaining three books of the Torah is quite short in comparison — especially given the forty-year time period in which the people end up wandering on their way to this promised land. Yet within these few passages we’ll read, we can see the people wrestling with what it means to be holy — literally meaning “to be set apart” — as they follow (and struggle to follow) these 613 commandments that make them distinct from their neighbors, a distinction that will come further into view as we explore the troubling books of Joshua and Judges next week.

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