NOTES for Lev 16:1-34
The Book of Leviticus prescribes a special monthly cleansing for the sins of the people. It is connected with the episode when certain people, not being priests, decided to offer a sacrifice and died because of the defilement of the sanctuary. This episode is mentioned in the Book of Leviticus without details. It is described in somewhat greater detail in the Book of Numbers, but there too the details are not numerous. One thing is clear: this concerns the defilement of the sanctuary, which can become deadly for a person.
In the case described, this concerns deliberate disregard of the prescribed norms and rules, but the prescribed purification rituals presuppose the cleansing of the whole people from uncleanness about which the people may not even know. Such a view of uncleanness may seem strange if one does not take into account the fact that, as people believed in those days, a person could be defiled not only by sin. Of course, when the matter concerns the people, one could speak of some unnoticed or forgotten sins.
It would seem that if a person does not know or does not remember his sin, there can be no question of repentance: it is impossible to repent of what one does not know. If we are speaking of sin as such, this is indeed so. Here, however, what is meant is not only sin but also its consequences, and even its consequences first of all, because it is precisely they that defile a person and keep him from being sanctified. If such a person, unready for sanctification, approaches the altar, he can defile the altar, and perhaps even die.
The point is that sanctification presupposes a change in the quality of a person's life, in which the stream of his soul, and in the Bible a "living soul" is precisely a stream, a process, a dynamic reality, changes so greatly that the person can in principle partake of the life of the Kingdom. At the time when the Book of Leviticus was written, the time of the Kingdom's nearness had not yet arrived, but God's effect on a person was the same then as it is today. Meanwhile, the defiled person approached the altar in a state in which his life was being drained rather than filled.
The state of defilement is nothing other than a process of continuous, ongoing depletion of the stream of life, the opposite of sanctification as its filling. Two such opposite spiritual effects can, in certain cases, truly be deadly for a person and destructive for a people. Special rituals of purification for the people are prescribed precisely to avoid something like this, so that defilement of which the people are unaware does not destroy their life.