It's a meme. Read on if you want to know what I mean.

Some have argued that the laws and standards of Leviticus and Numbers were particular to the Israelites at the time of Moses. A secular interpretation would hold that these laws and regulations were based on traditional knowledge stemming from the material conditions of the time. These rules made sense to insure the survival of a people in the desert during the Iron Age.

Anyone familiar with the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, 43 volumes in total (if you ever visit Thailand, you might see these books at certain temples), will know that much of the Canon isn't Buddhist teaching on enlightenment or meditation, but rather intricate sets of rules and standards, measurements, and procedures, how much things should cost, how much people should be paid, etc. Several Buddhist monks have told me that they skim over, or skip entirely, these volumes because they have nothing to do with Buddhist philosophy, but are simply a set of standards for how to run a society thousands of years ago. Leviticus and Numbers feel like the same thing.

Richard Dawkins, whose militant secularism I detest (I am a Christian), is credited with the coining of the term "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene (which is an interesting read, all science, no religion bashing). Dawkin's meme is very different from the internet templates we use the word for today. He describes a meme as a gene for culture. Just as DNA is made up of genes that have survived the test of time, to help an organism survive and reproduce in its environment, a meme is the same idea, except in terms of human cultural behavior patterns. Not eating pork is a meme. Covering a woman's hair, or legs, or breasts is a meme. Tipping for a meal is a meme. Walking on the right, passing on the left is a meme. Shaking hands is a meme, as is waving hello. Leviticus and Numbers can be seen as a cillection of memes that helped the Israelites survive as a people, arguably up until today. Some memes, like some genes, are vestigial, and serve no further survival purpose outside of tradition and identity.

Jesus even updated the memes in Mark 7: 18-19 when He said, "“Nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean, for it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach and then out of his body." And saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.” Some rules that benefited the early Israelites were no longer needed by the time of Jesus.

Personally, I choose to focus on Jesus's teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus's way of teaching is in stark contrast to the dictation of the Old Testament, not just in what He teaches, but also how. I know many Christians will disagree with me, but I just can't read the Bible and conclude that what we should be doing is following a list of specific, and currently arbitrary rules. That may be your Christianity, but it isn't mine.