Leviticus 21:20

The LORD speaks to Moses, and Moses is to carry his words to Aaron. “And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying” is the sentence that opens one new instruction after another in Leviticus, and each time it tells us that the law which follows comes from God. The name is Yᵉhôvâh, the personal name of the self-existent, eternal God who bound himself to Israel by covenant. The verb dâbar is the common Hebrew word for speaking and telling. God speaks first, and Moses listens. Moses’ own name, Môsheh, comes from a word for drawing out, given to him because he was drawn out of the water (Exodus 2:10).

Moses stands in this place because Israel asked for it and God appointed it. At Sinai the people were afraid of God’s voice and begged Moses to speak with God for them (Exodus 20:18–19). Other prophets received visions and dreams, while with Moses the LORD spoke “mouth to mouth” (Numbers 12:8), and God later promised to raise up a prophet like him (Deuteronomy 18:18). So the rules that follow are God’s own commands, and Israel was to hear them and keep them as they were given (Deuteronomy 4:1–2). The same is true of all Scripture, which is given by inspiration of God (2 Timothy 3:16).

The message is addressed to Aaron, the head of the priestly family, and it covers “thy seed in their generations”, every son of his line for as long as that priesthood lasts.

Israel is camped at Sinai, newly brought out of Egypt. The tabernacle has been set up as God’s dwelling among his people (Exodus 40), and Aaron’s family has been appointed to serve in it. The priests stood between God and Israel. They brought the people’s offerings to God, and they taught his law to the people and blessed them in his name. The deaths of Nadab and Abihu had already shown how serious it was to come near a holy God wrongly (Leviticus 10:1–2).

Leviticus 17–20 gives laws of holiness for the whole nation, summed up in the command “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), a call the book had already given once before (Leviticus 11:44). Leviticus 21–22 then turns to the priests, who are held to a higher standard because they serve nearest to him. The high priest wore the words “HOLINESS TO THE LORD” engraved on a plate of gold (Exodus 28:36).

Chapter 21 begins with rules about mourning and marriage for every priest (Leviticus 21:1–9) and stricter ones for the high priest (Leviticus 21:10–15). Our passage then turns from the priest’s conduct to his body, and Leviticus 22 goes on to the handling of holy things and the animals that may be offered.

The rule is given in verse 17 and repeated in verses 18 and 21: a priest who has a blemish is to stay back from offering. The word for blemish, mʼûwm, means a defect or spot. It is the word Leviticus uses for the flaws that make an animal unfit for sacrifice (Leviticus 22:20–25), and the list in verses 18 to 20 shows that conditions of the body are meant here.

Two verbs describe what he is kept from. In verses 17 and 18 it is qârab, to approach or to bring near, and in verse 21 it is nâgash, to come or draw near. In this setting both mean coming to the altar to do a priest’s work there. Verse 21 names that work as offering “the offerings of the LORD made by fire”, such as the burnt offerings and peace offerings, and then widens it to “the bread of his God”, which takes in every offering laid on the altar. The verse states the blemish, states it again, and gives the ruling a second time, so that the matter is left beyond doubt.

The word for the man in verses 18 and 19, ʼîysh, is the ordinary word for an individual man, so the rule falls on each priest one by one.

Verse 18 begins with the blind and the lame, two conditions that would also make it hard to move about the sanctuary and to handle the sacrifices with care. Next comes “he that hath a flat nose”, where the Hebrew châram describes a nose that is blunted, disfigured or mutilated, perhaps by injury or disease. “Any thing superfluous” is a part of the body beyond the usual, such as an extra finger or toe or an overlong limb.

Verse 19 adds the man who is “brokenfooted, or brokenhanded”. The word sheber means a break or an injury, here to the foot (regel) or the hand (yâd). A priest stood and walked through his whole service, and his hands did nearly all of it: they handled the holy vessels, laid the offerings on the altar and were lifted to bless the people.

Verse 20 has six more. “Crookbackt” (gibbên, from a root meaning to be arched) is a hunched or badly curved spine. “A dwarf” is a man of unusually small stature. “A blemish in his eye” (tᵉballul, from a root meaning to flow) is a cataract or film over the eye. “Scurvy” and “scabbed” are lasting skin diseases, the first something like chronic eczema or ringworm and the second a festering or spreading sore. The KJV’s “scurvy” is an old word for such a condition and has no link with the vitamin deficiency that now bears the name. Last is the man who “hath his stones broken” (mᵉrôwach, bruised or crushed), an injury to the testicles that left him emasculated. In a priesthood handed down from father to son, that injury touched the very means by which the line continued.

The list takes in conditions a man is born with and conditions that come by accident or illness. Some would hinder the work itself, and others would simply be seen.

God required it as a sign of his own perfection. The tabernacle was the dwelling place of a perfectly holy God, an earthly picture of his heavenly dwelling, and everything in its service was to show that holiness. The animals laid on the altar had to be “without blemish” (Leviticus 1:3), and the same rule was carried over to the men who presented them. The offering and the one who offered it both had to be whole, because God deserves the best and what represents him must be complete. When Israel later brought blind and lame animals to the altar, Malachi rebuked them for it (Malachi 1:8).

So the rule was a lesson that all Israel could see. A priest’s sound body pictured the wholeness and blamelessness needed in anyone who stands between a holy God and his people. The nations around Israel also prized bodily soundness in their priests and sacrifices, and often took it as a sign of a god’s favour. Israel’s law rests on the holiness of the LORD, and it attaches no blame to the man himself. These conditions came by birth or by accident, outside a man’s control, and the law treats them as a matter of fitness for one ceremony. Scripture is plain that “the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Verse 22 is the kindness in this law: “He shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy.” The verb ʼâkal is the plain word for eating. The priest who is kept from offering the bread of his God is given that bread to eat.

This mattered for his living. The priests had no share of land among the tribes, and they lived on what Israel brought to the LORD (Numbers 18:20–24). A priest cut off from the holy food would have lost his livelihood, and God saw to it that a blemish cost a man his task at the altar and left his table full.

The word for holy, qôdesh, means a thing set apart for God, or holiness itself, and the verse names two grades of it. The “most holy” things (qodesh qodashim) were the priests’ parts of the sin offering, the trespass offering and the meal offering, eaten only by the males of the priestly family and only within the sanctuary court (Leviticus 6:29). The “holy” things, such as the priests’ portions of the peace offerings and the heave and wave offerings, could be eaten in any clean place by a priest’s household, his daughters included (Leviticus 10:14). The blemished priest receives both, which is the full provision of a priest.

His standing rests on God’s calling of Aaron’s family, and his duties at the altar are a separate matter. The same care for his servants appears throughout Scripture. Jesus tells us to take no thought for food and clothing because our Father knows that we need them (Matthew 6:25–33), Paul writes that God shall supply all our need (Philippians 4:19), and the Lord told Paul in his weakness, “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Verse 23 states the limit once more and gives its reason. “The vail” (pôreketh) is the curtain that hung between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place, where the ark of the covenant stood (Exodus 26:31–33). Only the high priest passed beyond it, once a year on the Day of Atonement. “The altar” (mizbêach) is the altar of burnt offering in the court, where the sacrifices for atonement were made. Between them the two mark out the places of priestly service, the inner one and the outer one.

The purpose is “that he profane not my sanctuaries”. To profane, châlal, is to treat a holy thing as common. The concern of the verse is the holiness of God’s house, and the priest’s character is left out of it. The ground of the whole law is its closing sentence: “for I the LORD do sanctify them.” To sanctify, qâdash, is to set apart as holy. The tabernacle and its altar are holy because God made them so, as he had promised to do (Exodus 29:44). Since their holiness is his own work, he decides how they are to be approached, just as he set apart the Sabbath day (Exodus 20:8–11) and marked out the clean from the unclean (Leviticus 11).

Moses delivered it to Aaron, to Aaron’s sons and to the whole nation, because the holiness of the priests concerned everyone. The word for “told” is dâbar, the verb used of the LORD in verse 16, so what God spoke to Moses, Moses spoke on. “His sons” (bên, son) are the priests then living, and through them the generations to come.

A rule for priests might have been kept among priests. God had it told to all the children of Israel, so that the people would know what he required of those who served on their behalf, would respect the office, and would be able to hold their priests to it. Israel as a whole was called to be “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exodus 19:6), and the holiness of the men at the altar was bound up with the nation’s own walk with God.

Every priest who met this standard was still a sinner. He had to offer sacrifice for his own sins before he offered for the people, and he did it day after day (Hebrews 7:27), until he died and another took his place. A sound body could only picture the wholeness that a true mediator needs. That wholeness is found in Jesus Christ, the high priest who is “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens” (Hebrews 7:26).

He is both the priest and the offering. John the Baptist called him the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and Peter says that we were redeemed with his precious blood, “as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19). He offered himself without spot to God (Hebrews 9:14), once for all (Hebrews 9:28), and by his own blood he obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12). He is the bread as well. Where the old priests offered and ate the bread of their God, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35).

Moses, who carried God’s word to Aaron, pointed ahead to him too. Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant (Hebrews 8:6), the one mediator between God and men (1 Timothy 2:5). The law was given by Moses, and grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17), the Word made flesh (John 1:14), who is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).

The veil that the blemished priest was kept from has been opened. While the first tabernacle stood, the Holy Ghost was showing that the way into the holiest was still closed (Hebrews 9:8). When Jesus died, the veil of the temple was torn (Matthew 27:51), and he has entered heaven itself to appear before God for us (Hebrews 9:24). We now have boldness to enter the holiest by his blood, by a new and living way (Hebrews 10:19–22). Our great high priest was tempted as we are, “yet without sin”, and so we come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:14–16).

This passage shows the holiness of God and his kindness side by side. He guards his altar, and he feeds the man he keeps back from it. In Christ all who believe are “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9), “an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). Our offerings are praise, prayer, obedience and service, and our own selves, presented as “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Romans 12:1).

The blemishes that matter in this priesthood are those of the heart, such as sin kept hidden, mixed motives, hypocrisy and a divided loyalty. God still calls his people to be holy in all their conduct, because he is holy (1 Peter 1:15–16), and to follow holiness (Hebrews 12:14). Our welcome before him rests on Christ’s perfection, which is why a believer who knows his own faults may still draw near.

The priest with a blemish also speaks to anyone who feels limited or of little use. His worth to God lay in belonging to the family God had called, and his place at the table held when the work at the altar was closed to him. God looks past what a person can do to whose that person is, and he provides for his own.