Leviticus is not an easy book to read. It presents topics that seem arcane to the ear, including the laws of animal offerings, the baffling purification ritual for tzara’at, and an origin story for the holiday of Yom Kippur that treats forgiveness almost as an afterthought. In these pages, Rabbi Fohrman shows that an important key to understanding Leviticus lies in the previous books of Genesis and Exodus. In the process, he makes this book accessible and its study deeply meaningful.

In this third of five Parsha Companions, Rabbi David Fohrman asks questions that, in hindsight, seem like they were staring you in the face the whole time. He discerns nuance. He detects patterns in the original Hebrew that — once you see them — seem to leap off the page. And he shows how many of these discoveries, astoundingly, aren’t really “new” at all, but were suggested thousands of years ago by the ancient sages of the Talmud and Midrash themselves.