Leviticus 19. 33-34 - the Forgotten Injunction: A Case Study of 'Alien' Students in Senga and Nehosho Suburbs of Gweru, Zimbabwe

Abstract

The Priestly material in Leviticus has for a long time been a devalued part of the Hebrew Bible. The general trend of modern scholarship tends to be characterized by a deep-seated bias that views impurity rules as primitive and irrational taboos, and sacrifice as controlled savagery that is empty of any spiritual meaning. The central message, however, of the book of Leviticus expressed in the formulation,“You shall be holy because I, the Lord, am holy”(Lev. 11: 45) is still relevant for Christians today. The book, in other words, is a literary expression of God’s desire that his holiness be reflected in the daily lives of his covenant people. Such a call to holiness is what this paper sees as having been violated as some landlords and landladies of Senga and Nehosho suburbs of Gweru in Zimbabwe, borrowing the language of Amos,“lie upon beds of ivory”(6: 4) while poor students are packed like sacks in bundles of 6 to 8 peo-1 While the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child would define a child as a human being under 18 years of age, unless the law of his or her country deems him or her to be an adult at an earlier age, the definition used in this paper is a contextualized one. The understanding of who a child is in this paper is the one shared by Chinyangara et al (1997) who argue that in Zimbabwe, a young person is viewed as a child until he/she participates in the social and economic roles enjoyed by adults, not according to the law. In the African sense, the definition of a child is a social construct and thus value laden. It is not calculated in terms of chronological age but by what role the child can or does play in society at any given …