NOTES for Lev 7:1-38

Sacrificial meat could be eaten not only in the courtyard of the Tabernacle or the Temple; it could also be eaten at home. With family and friends. In fact, a person is sanctified at the altar not so that this holiness would remain there, at the altar. The whole point of sanctification is to take holiness with you. Into ordinary life. Into that very everyday life that especially needs sanctification, and needed it all the more in those days when God was present only where He was present, and the whole world was not yet in God's presence, as it became after the coming of Christ.

Even then, however, there were certain limits. The sacrificial meat could be eaten for two days, and what remained on the third day had to be burned. Not because it would have spoiled by the third day; meat well roasted or baked over coals could keep for quite a long time.

The issue was not the meat, but the person. The issue was that a person could not hold on to the state of sanctification that he received at the altar. This is not surprising: this was precisely a state, and a state that is not natural to fallen man. To keep what had been received at the altar, or more exactly, to remain in it, special efforts had to be made. These are the efforts we usually call ascetic today, and about which we rarely know anything definite. Meanwhile, in the time when the prescriptions given in this chapter of Leviticus were given, there was still no question at all of any asceticism.

At that time a person was sanctified and became different, and experience showed that he could hold out for one day, two at most: he could still keep from falling, from losing what he had received, from slipping back into his former, ordinary state, which had nothing to do with holiness. On the third day, however, and here, sadly, experience spoke again, a person inevitably became his former self. That meant he no longer could, and should not, eat sacrificial meat, sanctified food, as if it were ordinary food.

Not, of course, because the meat stopped being sanctified: meat is meat, it has no free will and cannot choose. A person can, and his will, his inner collectedness, his concentration were not enough for him to remain as he had been in the courtyard of the Tabernacle or the Temple when he approached the altar. This is where defilement becomes possible: the person comes into contact with sanctified nature without being spiritually ready for such contact. Such a person inevitably ceases to be part of God's people, at least if he does this deliberately.