Clement of Alexandria — Commentary on Scripture

Leviticus 5:7

Through Moses God orders that two young birds, a pair of pigeons or of turtledoves, be offered for any sin. This means that the sinlessness of such gentle birds and their guilelessness and forgetfulness of injury is very acceptable to God. So he is instructing us to offer a sacrifice bearing the character of that against which we have offended. The plight of the poor doves, moreover, will instill into us a beginning of abhorrence for sin.

The Instructor Book 1

Leviticus 11:3

With whom then should we live? With the just, he replies, again under a metaphor. Everything “of split hoof and chewing the cud” is clean, because the split hoof obviously is a sign of evenly balanced justice, which chews the cud of its own food of justice, the word, which enters from without through instruction. And, once within, [it] is recalled as if from the stomach of the mind for the musings of reason. The just man chews the cud of spiritual nourishment, because he holds the Word in his mouth. Justice undoubtedly divides the hoof, in that it both sanctifies in this life and prepares us as well for the life to come.

The Instructor Book 3

Leviticus 11:4-13

The all-wise Educator, by the lips of Moses, compared association with corrupt men to living with swine when he forbade the ancient people to partake of swine. He made it plain in those words that they who invoke God should not seek the company of the unclean who, like swine, revel in bodily pleasures and filthy habits of life and impure delights, itching for evil-minded pleasures of sex.

The Instructor Book 3

Leviticus 11:4-13

He adds too that they are not to eat “kite or mastophage or eagle,” meaning “You shall not go near those who make their livelihood by plundering others.” He says other similar things under some sort of allegory.

The Instructor Book 3

Leviticus 11:4-13

It is then proper that the barbarian philosophy, on which it is our business to speak, should prophesy also obscurely and by symbols, as was evinced. Such are the injunctions of Moses: “These common things, the sow, the hawk, the eagle and the raven, are not to be eaten.” For the sow is the emblem of voluptuous and unclean lust of food and lecherous and filthy licentiousness in venery, always prurient, and material, and lying in the mire and fattening for slaughter and destruction.

The Stromata Book 5

Leviticus 15:18

In the past, a man coming from marital intercourse was required to wash. It cannot be too strongly said that the providence of God revealed through the Lord no longer makes this demand. The Lord eliminates washing after intercourse as unnecessary since he has cleansed believers by one single baptism for every such encounter, just as he takes in the many washings prescribed by Moses by one single baptism.

The Stromata Book 3

Leviticus 19:9-10

Do you see how the law proclaims simultaneously the justice and goodness of God, who provides food unstintingly for all? Again, in the grape harvest the harvesters are forbidden to go back and cut anything that has been left over or to collect fallen grapes. The same rules are applied to olive gatherers. In fact the principle of tithing crops and flocks was an education in honoring the divine. We are not to be totally absorbed by profit but to share humanely with the neighbor as well.

The Stromata Book 2

Leviticus 19:9-10

During the harvest, [the law] forbids owners to gather up the bits which fall from the sheaves and similarly advises that in harvesting something should be left behind unreaped. By this it gives excellent teaching to owners in the practice of generous sharing by leaving some of their property for those in need and providing the poor with a chance for food.

The Stromata Book 2

Leviticus 22:27

Scripture says, “At least grant the offspring to its mother for its first seven days.” For if nothing comes to be without reason and milk flows in the mothers for the nourishment of the offspring, then in taking the offspring away from the providential endowment of the milk, a person is doing violence to nature. So Greeks and anyone else who runs the law down ought to blush for shame if the law is generous over irrational beasts. Yet some people actually expose human offspring to abortive death. By prophetic authority the law has for a long time cut short their ferocity through this commandment of which we have been speaking. For if the law refuses to allow the offspring of irrational creatures to be separated from their mother before taking milk, it is far more forceful in preparing human beings against that cruel, uncivilized view [exposure to death of infants]. If they ignore nature, at least they may not ignore the lessons of the law.

The Stromata Book 2

Leviticus 25:4

So do we now understand how the law educates us in piety, sharing, justice and humanity? Well? Does it not enjoin that the land lie fallow through the seventh year and invites the poor not to be afraid to use any crops that grow by God’s grace, nature acting as farmer for any who will?

The Stromata Book 2