Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 16-18.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

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I mentioned in my video recording of me reading this passage that the word Azazel used in this passage is not used anywhere else in the Bible and that it’s meaning is unclear.  Even the etymology of the word is unclear.  The last time I looked into the meaning of the word I found that scholars had no good idea about its Hebrew roots that would explain its presence here.  However, when I looked it up today, I found a reference which suggested that Azazel derives from the Hebrew word for goat, “ez”, and the Hebrew word meaning to go away, “Azal”.  So, by that thinking, azazel would mean “the goat that goes away”.  I would note that at the time when Leviticus was first written down, Hebrew had no method of denoting vowels.  So, perhaps the word was originally “ezazal”.   If this interpretation is correct, the idea behind the goat being sent to Azazel would be that the people of Israel were sending their sins away to never be seen again, that they were distancing themselves from their previous sins.  I like that way of looking at it, because we also should distance ourselves from sin.

This passage also contains the laws concerning sexual practices which God calls abominations.  The passage includes that a man shall not have sex with another man, but it’s almost a throw away.  The way I read this passage, the author seems to think that the other sexual sins it lists before that are more likely to be passed over as “OK”, and they are most definitely NOT OK.  At the end of the passage it says something about the sins it lists here that I do not believe it says about other sins.  It says that the people of the land to which God was leading them practiced these sins and as a result the land vomited them out.  This harkens back to what God told Abram in Genesis 15, where He said that “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”  I also want to note that towards the end of this list of sins which are an abomination to God it mentions sacrificing children.  Sacrificing children is the only non-sexual sin in this list of abominations.  I want to reiterate that this passage says that sexual sins will cause the land to vomit out the people living in it.  Among the sins listed here is that which Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 5, where he says that it was reported to him that a man among them was committing sexual immorality of a kind not even tolerated among the pagans.

In fact, Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians is the same as the one here, anyone who practices such abominations shall be cut off from their people (I will note that in 2 Corinthians Paul told them to accept the man back after he stopped committing that sin).  So, here, and in the New Testament, we are to distance ourselves from sin.  Paul carefully points out that the distancing applies to those who identify as being of the people of God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.