Here's one: I've just passed 20,000 characters for the project! (Including spaces and punctuation, of course.)

We've got about a week left of our journey through the book of Numbers.

There are a lot fewer numbers in it than the title would lead you to believe. The most consistent theme seems to be the Israelites grumbling against God and Moses.

How easy it is to take the blessings we have received for granted and grumble about the details!

Leviticus has a reputation for gore, repetativeness and obscure laws about shellfish and mixed fabrics. As I come to the end of my fifth time through the book I can sympathise to some degree, but we should be careful not to miss the wood for the trees.

It seems to me that there are two main concerns in the law:

1. that the Israelites should be set apart from the practises of the nations around them
2. that they should be just and compassionate in their dealings with neighbours and strangers

Or, holiness and compassion.

The laws that encourage love and respect for one another and generosity towards the poor and outsiders seem very contemporary. Progressive even. Those tend to be the laws that are concerned with compassion.

Many of the laws we find hardest to understand are those concerned with holiness: often to do with the Israelites not taking on the (now extinct) beliefs and practises of the religions around them.

As modern readers we may feel tensions between those two threads, but I think it's more interesting to look for the unity.

The concern for holiness and the concern for compassion were very much integrated in the worldview of the Old Testament people. How were they held together?

Perhaps we could sum it up as: "Love the LORD you God and love your neighbour as yourself."

Over the last few chapters Leviticus has moved from laws about sacrifices and priests to instructions for the Israelites about their diet, about childbirth, about diseases, their houses and now even the most intimate parts of their bodies.

We've already had stories of rape, murder, war and national disaster in previous summaries, but Leviticus 15 has generated more reaction than any chapter since the very beginning of the project.

I expected that these chapters over the next few days would probably be controversial, so I've already been reflecting on it a little.

I'm sure there are many reasons why people would or wouldn't want to see the word 'discharge' on their Twitter feed first thing in the morning, but one theme that I want to say a little more about is the implication in some of the responses that the Bible shouldn't have anything to say about things like that.

I think the line of thinking goes something like this: it's reasonable for the Bible to have things to say about God, religious life and perhaps even national life, but genital hygiene and sexuality are not appropriate subjects for religion.

In our culture we think of things like the religion, law, hygiene, social justice, diet and politics as very separate spheres of life (and some people seem to actively believe that they should be separate). But that's not the picture in the culture of the Old Testament at all.

The Israelites had a very integrated view of life. Every sphere from the most hidden to the most public was part of a continuity under the covenant God had made with them. It was therefore completely natural for the Scriptures to speak into every part of life.

There's a lot more to be said if we're getting into comparing cultures, and I'm not meaning to go too far into that, but I do think that it's worth us asking whether it's a good thing that our lives are so separate (fragmented?) before we decide that the Bible shouldn't talk about certain subjects.