This paper explores the interactions surrounding Bible teaching as a means of understanding how Jewish youth are discursively implicated within ideologies of community. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology and interactional sociolinguistics, I present a micro-analysis of a classroom lesson on the book of Leviticus to analyze how the social construct of communal identification is discursively and linguistically constructed through the teacher's use of deictic expressions, reported speech, and other rhetorical and lexical features. These contextual cues work to conflate the spatiotemporal boundaries between antiquity and the present-day classroom context, and mesh the experiences of the students with those of the ancient Israelites. (Contains 9 footnotes.)