Titled Leviticus!, the game, as its title suggests, is both irreverent and deeply faithful to the source text—all that business about doves and cows and purity is right there in the book. But whereas Leviticus is too thick with rules to make for a very compelling read, it’s perfect when played.Obviously.
This insight came to the game’s creator, Sarah Lefton, in shul. It was Yom Kippur, and she was davening but feeling not only hungry but burned out. Leafing through the machzor, she stumbled across a reading from Leviticus 16, detailing the high priest’s obligations on Judaism’s holiest day. Lefton—the executive director of G-dcast, a nonprofit that produces animated shorts of biblical texts designed as educational tools—read on, fascinated. It didn’t take long for the epiphany to hit her.
“The whole book is a series of rules,” she said. “It’s all about how the priest should do this but shouldn’t do that, and if he did something a certain way, something will happen, and if he didn’t, it won’t. It’s just a bunch of rules with rewards and punishment, and that’s what games are.”
The book of Leviticus (in the context of a rather weird Talmudic discussion) also comes up in an article about how Drew Barrymore is having her tattoos removed in order to convert to Judaism for her new husband: The Tattoo: Stil Taboo?
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 103b) records a bizarre dispute about a tattoo that King Jehoiakim of Judah had on his male organ. Interpreting the “abominations … found upon him” (II Chron. 36:8) as a tattoo, one rabbi averred that it consisted of the name of a pagan deity, while another rabbi disagreed, stating that in fact it was the name of God that had been inked there.And while we're on the subject of tattoos, note this recent post on an unfortunate Aramaic one, as well as this post, which collects references to tattoos in ancient languages, many of which did not turn out well.
Another Talmudic passage (Makkot 21a) indicates that the dispute about Jeoiakim’s tattoo may hinge upon the interpretation of Leviticus 19:38 (“You shall not … make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the Lord”). According to the first rabbi (echoed many centuries later by Maimonides), the Jewish aversion to tattoos is part of its age-old polemic against idolatry, contravening God’s declaration that “I am the Lord,” especially when paying explicit homage to a foreign god. In the view of the second sage, however, the biblical ban on tattoos is non-rational, rooted in divine fiat. As such, the most egregious type of tattoo, the most audacious rebellion against Jewish tradition, is specifically one that contains God’s name.
