Klawans (Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple) is disturbed by the gap between studies of biblical purity and studies of sacrifice. 

Mary Douglas proposed that Levitical purity was not primitive, but systematic, symbolic, and socially functional. Even those who are unconvinced by her proposals has to take Levitical purity seriously as a meaningful system. The same is not true for studies of Levitical sacrifice, which continue to focus on questions about the origin of sacrifice that are, Klawans rightly says, strictly irrelevant to the interpretation of Leviticus. 

Klawans’s book is an effort to begin to do for sacrifice what Douglas did for purity, and he does it in part by bringing purity and sacrifice into close relation, pointing out the obvious that sacrificial procedures in the Bible, like sacrificial procedures elsewhere in the ancient world, begin long before an animal is brought to the temple. Sacrificial procedures begin with the purification of the worshiper and the assurance that the animal is qualified for sacrifice. 

He doesn’t accept Jacob Milgrom’s idea that purity rules have to do entirely with death-avoidance. Rather, he suggests that the purity rules separate the worshiper from both sex and death. And he bundles these two together under the heading of imitatio Dei:

“Because God is eternal, God does not die. As [David] Wright puts it, ‘the mortal condition is incompatible with God’s holiness.’ Because God has no consort, God cannot have sex. Therefore, as Frymer-Kensky puts it, ‘in order to approach God, one has to leave the sexual realm’” (58).

Klawans goes on: “By separating from sex and death . . . ancient Israelites (and especially ancient Israelite priests and Levites) separated themselves from what made them least God-like. . . . the point of following these regulations is nothing other than the theological underpinning of the entire Holiness Code: imitatio Dei. . . . Only a heightened, god-like state - the state of ritual purity - made one elegible to enter the sanctuary.” He approving quotes from Hubert and Mauss (Sacrifice): “all that touches upon the gods must be divine; the sacrificer is obliged to become a god himself in order to be capable of acting upon them” (58).

This fails at a couple of points. First, it doesn’t explain every form of impurity, specifically impurity for skin disease. Perhaps Klawans would treat that as a species of “death,” but that seems to be the kind of conceptual stretch he’s trying to avoid in his critique of Milgrom. 

Second, and more seriously, his explanation implicitly blurs the difference between holiness and purity, or, to say the same differently, between worshiper and priest. The clean Israelite is not in a heightened state, but simply in a state acceptable to enter the courtyard. He doesn’t need to be entirely without blemish (as the priests do): A hunch-backed, blind Israelite man with crushed testicles can still bring his offering, though, to be sure, the priest who does the offering must have a blemishless body (Leviticus 21-22). 

Priestly consecration and ritual purity are related - both have to do with access to God. But they are not the same, and the worshiper doesn’t have to be elevated to be worthy to worship. 

Perhaps Klawans’s thesis can be rescued if we stop with the negative part: The worshiper has to be Godlike in the sense of being separated from death and sex, but only the priest has to be elevated, in addition, into the holy sphere of God’s presence. Normally, it takes two to sacrifice - one clean, another holy.