In last weeks’ reading of the Hebrew scriptures:

I am into Leviticus, and the beginning of the book and at the end of Exodus there’s a lot of very specific rules as to sacrifices.

In fact, though my inclination is to skip over some of the stuff about goats without a blemish, it struck me that the priests had to be pretty deft with their knives, because the commandments include carving fat away from kidneys and the rules are quite specific as to how to sacrifice the fat (turn it into smoke) versus the meat of various animals.

It’s exhausting (and, let me say it, boring) to read precisely what jewels go where, and what clothes priests are to wear when they sacrifice and where they smear the blood.

There must have been a lot of blood and I can’t imagine how it smelled with the thousands upon thousands of dead animals.

The one thing that struck me was that God always asked for the best, the animals without blemish, the biggest bulls, the best wheat, and if someone tried to pass a second-best off as their best, there’d be hell to pay.