Leviticus

The book of Leviticus picks up right where Exodus leaves off.  In many ways it could be thought of as "Exodus 2: The Sequel".  Just like in Exodus, Leviticus is a mixture of narrative and declaration of laws, although Leviticus has much more law and less narrative than Exodus does.  In Leviticus, most of the laws given from God deal with offerings, the priests, cleanliness, and other ceremonial issues.  In fact, the name in Greek is a reference to the Levites, the tribe who were the priests in ancient Israel.  The name in Hebrew means something a long the lines of "and He called", again taken from the opening line of the book (as are apparently all the Hebrew titles of the books in the Pentateuch).

While the majority of the laws in Leviticus deal with offerings, cleanliness and priestly duties, there are other more moral commandments given as well, all though they are heavily surrounded in the text by ceremonial rules.  The laws in Leviticus (and all of the Pentateuch) are interesting, in that they are always presented as part of a narrative. ("And God said to Moses...").  They are never directly declared from a first person perspective, but told in an over-arching narrative about what happened with Moses and the early Israelites.  In Leviticus, all of the narratives outside of giving the law deal with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as the first priests, and things related to them.  The vast majority of the text is the giving of the laws.

The narrative about Aaron and his sons takes place in the middle of the book.  Before this narrative Moses enters the Tabernacle (perhaps immediately after the events ending in Exodus) and is told the laws pertaining to offerings and priests.  After this he is told to have Aaron and his sons come into the tabernacle to be ordained for a week.  After this happens we learn about how two of Aaron's sons perform an unlawful sacrifice, and are immediately killed by God for it.  Two of Aaron's other sons also get in trouble with Moses, although are forgiven after they make their sin offering.  After this narrative occurs, the rest of the book is the giving of laws about cleanliness and holiness.  Some authors see this split between the laws before and after this narratives as being theologically significant, while others apparently do not.  I don't know enough about this topic to make any conjectures on it, though.  It is interesting to see the narrative about the first priests failing at their duties, because it does follow the common pattern we saw before in Genesis about the people called by God not living up to God's standard.  And just like before, some of the sons are shown mercy, while some are not.  (Similar to Noah's Flood and other stories, which feature God's wrath and mercy at the same time).  I guess you might say a big theme of Leviticus is that God has very high standards, but is merciful to those who are repentant.