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Ought they to run the risk of entirely upsetting those solemn, engagements by incurring the Levitical penalty of contact with a corpse? There was but a mere chance that they could do any good. This person was entirely unknown to them; his life might not be worth saving, for he might be a rascal; and, on the other hand, there were sacred duties duties to their God.
Furthermore, there were reasons to apprehend that the holy flame of prophecy was dying out. Malachi may have been speaking still, but there was not much promise that he would have a successor, and the expectation of prophetic voices was growing dim among the people. The Levitical ritual, now so elaborate and cumbersome, had supplanted the prophetic oracle.
He affirmed that the sacrificial ritual of the book of Leviticus had its roots in the heathen sacrifices growing out of their false conception that their deities must be appeased by the shedding of blood. The Levitical ritual was, therefore, never written nor given by Moses.
It is true that the Jewish synagogue furnished a model to the church; but the Levitical race claimed no peculiar sanctity, and discharged no friendly office beyond the precincts of the temple. In the synagogue the people assembled to pray, or to hear the Scriptures read and expounded, not to receive religious instruction.
Under the Levitical law, the sin of ignorance, as it was called, was to be expiated by a somewhat different sacrifice from that offered for the wilful and deliberate sin; but it must be expiated. A victim must be offered for it. It was guilt before God, and needed atonement. Our Lord, in His prayer for His murderers, said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."
On the other hand, there is not the slightest evidence of any belief in retribution after death, but the contrary; ritual obligations have at least as strong sanction as moral; there are clear indications that some of the most stringent of the Levitical laws were unknown even to Samuel; priests often appear to be superseded by laymen, even in the performance of sacrifices and divination; and no line of demarcation can be drawn between necromancer, wizard, seer, prophet, and priest, each of whom is regarded, like all the rest, as a medium of communication between the world of Elohim and that of living men.
For these gentiles are very careful of the levitical parts of their religion, deriving the same, as it seems to me, from the polity of the Hebrews, the fame of whose tabernacle must sure have gone forth through the ends of the woorld, and the knowledge of whose temple must have been yet more wide dispersed by Solomon, his ships, when they came into these parts to fetch gold from Ophir.
In the present results of Biblical criticism, however, I can discover no justification for the common assumption that, between the time of Joshua and that of Rehoboam, the Israelites were familiar with either the Deuteronomic or the Levitical legislation; or that the theology of the Israelites, from the king who sat on the throne to the lowest of his subjects, was in any important respect different from that which might naturally be expected from their previous history and the conditions of their existence.
Of course this was not the fundamental idea embodied in the Levitical system itself. The root of that system was the symbolizing of a supreme ideal of reconciliation hereafter to be manifested in action. Now a symbol is not the thing symbolized.
This may refer to the Levitical law, Exodus 21:28-36. The ox that had gored any one to death, 'shall be surely stoned' without possibility of escape, but the backslider or manslayer, although he lie equally under the sentence of death, yet may escape to the city of refuge. Ed.
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