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Robert Alter - Introduction to Leviticus pp. 541-545 and Parshat Shemini Notes 11:10 & 42-45
There is a single verb that focuses the major themes of Leviticus
"divide" (Hebrew, hivdil. That verb, of course, stands at the beginning
of the Priestly story of creation: "And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness... And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was."
... What enables existence and provides a framework for the development of human nature, conceived in God's image, and of human civilization is a process of division ...
That same process is repeatedly manifested in the ritual, sexual, and dietary laws of Levitieus. .... And you shall be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy (20:24-26). The same key Hebrew verb, hivdil, is used here, but because "divided you from all the peoples" ... might actually introduce an unintended idea of divisiveness, I have reluctantly abandoned consistency in this instance and represented it in English as " set apart." [MS: For what moral purpose is the Jewish civilization set apart? I think about Hamas barbarity and what kind of civilization defeats barbarity over war in many long generations, like Amalek.]
.... This last element of imitatio dei suggests that God's holiness, whatever else it may involve and however ultimately unfathomable the idea may be, implies an ontological division or chasm between the Creator and the created world, a concept that sets off biblical monotheism from the worldview of antecedent polytheisms, ...
Dividing, setting apart, the erection of barriers to access, are notions that suffuse all the regulations here about the Tabernacle (mishkam, more literally, God's terrestrial "dwelling place")....
Nevertheless, all these regulations are reflections of a pervasive spiritual seriousness grounded in a comprehensive, coherent conception of reality. This ritual implementation of the monotheistic vision was a battle against the inchoate. Holiness could be achieved, and had to be protected, only by a constant confirmation of hierarchical distinction, by laying out reality in distinct realms and categories separated by barricades of prohibitions. Thus, Aaron and his surviving sons, immediately after the death of Nadab and Abihu, are warned never to come into the sanctuary when they have drunk "[wline and strong drink," for in the view of the Priestly writers, authorized ritual is in all respects the exact opposite of ecstatic orgy (another departure in principle from the pagan world as it was imagined by Israelite writers).
This particular ban, like most of the injunctions of Leviticus, is framed to implement a general ideology of separation as "a perpetual statute for your generations, to divide between the holy and the profane, and between the unclean and the clean, and to teach the Israelites all the statutes that the Lord spoke by the hand of Moses" (10:9-11).
[MS: See Notes 11:10 and 42 and 45 for similar interpretations by Alter.]
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April 4, 2024