Read the Introduction
The first volume of Leviticus closed inside the veil. Aaron carried the blood once a year, the cloud covered the mercy seat, the scapegoat bore the iniquities of the congregation into a land not inhabited, and the account of the Day of Atonement stood finished with the sanctuary cleansed. Volume II opens at the next statute, and it opens with blood of another kind: not the blood the high priest carried within the veil, but the blood of every beast slaughtered in the camp by every man of the assembly. What the atonement settled at the altar is now delivered as a rule of conduct to the whole people, and from the seventeenth chapter forward the doctrine of the book steps out of the holy place into the field, the household, the courtroom, and the calendar.
Volume II of Leviticus runs from the seventeenth chapter through the thirty-fifth, and its argument is the holiness of a people who are themselves the dwelling of the One who set them apart. The sanctity of the blood comes first, with the life of the flesh declared to be in the blood and the price of atonement named aloud, so that no man may eat the life of the creature. The laws of sexual and social holiness follow, and they are drawn as boundaries rather than described as ideals: the relations forbidden within the family, then the statutes of the people that govern the gleaning of the field, the wages of the hireling, the just balances, and the one statute that binds the native and the stranger alike. The penalties of the code are then stated in full, the higher standard of the priests is set, and the calendar of appointed times is laid out month by month, from the passover to the sevenfold round of the seventh month.
Then the land itself is put on a clock. The seventh year is given as a sabbath of rest to the land, with the sixth year's increase promised as the provision for it, and the fiftieth year is proclaimed with the trumpet as the Jubilee, when liberty is cried through all the land to all the inhabitants thereof. The inheritance returns to the family that held it, the field is valued by the years that remain before the release, the poor brother is redeemed by his kin, and the man who sold himself is not held as a bondservant but serves until the year of release and goes out with his children. The kinsman-redeemer is written into the instrument as the mechanism of that redemption, the one who holds the right and the duty to buy back what the family has lost.
The volume then closes the covenant with the terms stated in full: the blessing set against the curse, the walking in the statutes against the despising of the judgments, and the whole given as the agreement on which the land is held. The final chapter takes up the vows and values them, setting a priestly table of valuation for persons devoted by a vow, adding the fifth part where a man redeems what he has sanctified, and reserving the tenth, the tithe, to the LORD as holy.
The doctrine carried through these chapters is release, and it is not a theory laid over the text. The Jubilee is the release mechanism written into the estate itself: the land could be sold but not alienated, and pledged but not lost, because the grant reserved the year when every field returns to its family and every man returns to his possession. Redemption and Jubilee work as one administration, the near kinsman acting in the years between and the trumpet at the end of them, so that no poverty is permanent and no sale is final. And the whole code hangs on one sentence spoken to all the congregation: Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy. The statutes are not the terms on which a people become holy; they are the conduct of a people already set apart by the One who speaks.
What makes this volume worth a book of its own is that the holiness of the people is administered in property, in time, and in the body, and the record gives each of them a rule. A people without a year of release would keep its poor poor and let its lands drift to the lenders, and a code without the valuation chapter would leave the vow unmeasured and the tithe undefined. Read the two volumes of Leviticus as one argument and the order is exact: first the atonement at the altar, then the holiness in the land. Read them as the record gives them, and the sanctity of the blood stands where it stands, the first statute after the veil was entered, and the measure of every release that follows it.
And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Leviticus 25:10
Nothing in this volume asks to be taken on trust. The scripture is quoted whole, the doctrine is named as doctrine wherever it goes beyond the text, and the weighing belongs to whoever holds the book.