You know, the names of a couple of the oldest books of the Bible in English are not very good. "Numbers" does have a census for the first few chapters, and I'll grant that a census isn't gripping reading. It impresses upon the reader the intended historicity of the account - Illiad has a long description of how many troops and boats came from where for a similar reason. After that, though, the book continues the narrative that left off in Exodus, and is similar in tone and content. The original name of the book, "Ba midvar" or "In the wilderness" is a better title, as it recounts the story of Israel's time in the wilderness.

Leviticus was my favorite book for a long time, and I still regard it with great affection. But I've also heard people deride it as nonsensical, and I get where that is coming from. Throwing the One Ring into Mount Doom has been similarly derided as "the destruction of some jewelry", which is how it must seem if you aren't familiar with the backstory and the symbolism. We live in an age that really likes to downplay context and symbolism and historical connections, and would tend to regard "the destruction of some jewelry" as a reasonable take - maybe even an enlightened take. Such a perspective sees the blood of bulls and rams in Leviticus as nothing else, and it's no wonder it seems gross and uncompelling. To me, that take is missing almost the entire story: if you can talk about the One Ring without saying anything about power, you have basically missed everything of significance about it. And in Leviticus, blood is life, God gives it and God claims it, and we learn from the rituals surrounding it that holiness and life requires sacrifice and death, something both immediately true and a deep truth at many levels. The invisible things, the symbols and connections and significances and virtues, have retreated from the modern mind, first becoming unimportant, then not real, then not even perceptible. I regard this as a tragic turn of events, and I think it is not unrelated to our current civilizational struggles. But any rate, ancient works in general, and the Bible in particular, put a lot of emphasis on the poetic, the symbolic, the deeper meanings of things. If you're going to enjoy such works, you're going to need to see beyond the literal.

For me, Leviticus has this breathtaking mix of the intensely symbolic and the intensely practical. I am often taken aback at the imagery being so on point, and yet so accessible to a poor bronze age people. And I think often on its lessons in leadership as I navigate related challenges. Above and beyond that, it does a lot to illustrate what God is like in terms of day to day relationship with him - an education about how this whole affair works, in contrast to the idols and magicians and cults. This is how things are, this is the sort of God you serve. Plenty of what it has to say about the life of the man of God is profound, perhaps even shocking.

And one more thing - it is unsurprising that an ancient handbook on ritual would seem incoherent to a people who have abandoned all practice of ritual and are energetically at work burning down any stray ones the last generation might have missed. Our individualism has metastasized to the point that it seems all common experiences must be destroyed on principle. I not only hail from that culture, but am doubly poor: as an evangelical protestant, my Christianity is shorn of tradition and liturgy, with sacrament reduced to the bare minimum required by the text. There are certainly historical reasons for that, up sides or at least intended up sides, and I'm not looking to convert. At the same time, I have been thinking recently about the role of ritual in teaching and binding together, in turning individuals into a people, and I can't deny that the body of the Catholic and the Orthodox seems to have a sort of spine to it that the Protestant lacks, and I'm starting to think this is why. Leviticus is ... God's solution to that need, at one place and time. I am a student, likely not even knowing what the poverty of my historical circumstance has left me ignorant of. But it may be not just an example to the religious - it may be that our society could learn a thing or two from this ancient social technology. This religion did survive for millenia, whereas our attempt at an anti-ritualistic, rationalistic, individualistic civilization seems to be fraying after a few short centuries. Maybe we could do with some civilizational mortar.

Anyway - that's some of what I see. I think it would take a lot of education and spiritual experience to get similar things on your own. Leviticus is a hard book. It may or may not help, but you can always look at a commentary to get some of the flavor of what an experienced reader sees. Here's one online example - https://ccel.org/ccel/henry/mhc1/mhc1.Lev.ii.html