The crops from Israel's harvests, celebrated in the festivals of Lev 23, would contribute to the worship of God. Olive oil would be used to keep the menorah in the tabernacle buring continually (Lev 24:1-3), and grain would be used in making the bread of the presence, twelve loaves each week representing the twelve tribes (vv 4-9).
On this chapter commentator Jay Sklar notes that when the lights are on and there is bread on the table, someone is home. The lampstand and table announced God's presence with his people.
Not all of the Israelites at Sinai wanted to be in God's presence. In one of only a couple of narratives in the book of Leviticus, a man made it known that he did not want to follow the God of Israel. After a blasphemous tirade that was an assault on God, he was stoned to death. Hands were laid upon his head, symbolizing the placement of the pollution produced by his words back upon him, and he was executed outside of the camp.
Fittingly, the man's name is not mentioned. We are told that he had an Egyptian father and a Danite mother. An imaginative midrash speculates that he was the son of the man that Moses had killed 40 years before (Ex 2:11).
Leviticus 24 is the second of three places in the Pentateuch in which the lex talionis is mentioned. This is simply the principle that a punishment for a crime should fit the crime.
In a sermon at Church of the Messiah on March 26, 2022, Kyle Kettering laid out the "olive tree theology" based on Paul's analogy in Romans 11 and expounded, for example, by Marvin Wilson in Our Father Abraham. In this analogy, believers from the nations are grafted into the olive tree of Israel, which is rooted in the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He encouraged members of the congregation to show grace to each other as we work out the meaning of our position in that olive tree.
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