Genesis 1 presents God's rule as majestic and uncontested. But read Genesis 1 alone–assume that it represents the biblical approach to creation, rather than merely one of them–and you will miss something crucial about biblical theology as a whole. Many biblical texts explicitly invoke a God who created the world by engaging in combat and dangerous and threatening forces of chaos...What makes parts of Tanakh so powerful, so compelling, and so utterly contemporary is precisely the fact that they do not paper over the reality that life can be so totally frightening, and seemingly so random and chaotic.
Rabbi Shai Held, Va-yikra #1
Genesis 1 and Leviticus are closely intertwined, since the project of dividing and separating is at least as crucial to the latter as it is to the former. As Robert Alter writes, "There is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus–'divide' (hivdil)."
Rabbi Shai Held, Va-yikra #1
Bible scholar Samuel Balentine captures beautifully the point [Rabbi Held is] trying to make: "Who among us does not yearn for that one place, however small and difficulty to find, that invites us to believe the 'very good' world God created and the world in which we scratch out our frail existence are one and the same?" Leviticus attempts to describe and thus to evoke that place. In reading and studying Leviticus, we are invited to imagine and inhabit just such a space–if only for a brief moment...
To read Leviticus, then, is to enter a different kind of world, a small pocket of reality in which God's will is heeded and perfectly executed, in which chaos and disorder are kept at bay–in which, thus, God is already fully God, even as the realities outside fall painfully short of that long longed-for dream.