Beauty

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (Thucydides (around 455 - 396 BC), Greek naval commander in the Peloponnesian War and historian). What about beauty in biblical texts such as those in the third book of Moses, the book Leviticus?

I want to show, that the texts of this book are composed in an artful manner. Nevertheless, biblical texts are the result of a long process from oral tradition to written fixation and beautiful composition. 

The final version of the texts ultimately claims to have been intended, if not written, by God himself. This divine claim is the background for a text formulated according to special aesthetic criteria. 

I try to discover and describe these criteria using examples. However, each text must prove for itself which ones were used in it.

My focus is therefore on the forms and standards of design and not so much on the historical processes of text creation. Of course, the "text modules" received had to be integrated during the creation of the text, which in some cases led to "tensions" in the final editing. 

The discovery of such "tensions" and "inconsistencies" has, in my opinion, misled German-speaking Old Testament (literary-critical) research in particular. As a result, attempts were made to project their own aesthetic ideal into the text analysis, which these texts understandably could not fulfil. 

It would therefore be good to reconstruct the development of the text as far as possible, and then apply the aesthetic criteria that may have formed the basis for the final editing.