Reading: Leviticus 11-13, Psalm 33
What do you eat? What don’t you?
What do you do about various bodily fluids and gooey stuff?
What do you do about weird skin conditions?
No, really. Think about it. We go through life without thinking about this stuff all the time- and who can blame us, really? Who wants to think about weird skin conditions unless you are forced to?
Who would you go to and how would you respond if your skin had weird colors or something? My guess is pretty much all of us in the modern world would high tail it to a medical practitioner, probably a skin specialist. We have pretty well sanitized our bodily functions these days, but if something goes awry I’m telling you I have a similar response: go see a specialist, and right quickly! Most people feel free to eat whatever they want, but there are still large groups of people in the world who restrict their diets for a variety of reasons: religious (hindus, for example), ethical (many vegetarians), availability (tribal groups near the arctic), or health (every diet plan follower ever.)
So. Is that what all this is? The ancient Israelite travel guide How to live as a nomad in Sinai? Well, no, I don’t believe it is. There is some element of social protection going on here, particularly when it comes to the skin diseases as they can be quite virulent. That is not the primary concern here, though. Recall God’s command in the reading yesterday: You are to make a distinction between the common and the holy, the pure and the impure. These are purity laws, not health codes or social organization. Ritual purity is pretty alien to our society- we tend to think in terms of good or bad, guilty or innocent. God is setting up in Israel a different layer of social condition, and not one that is inherently good or bad. Being impure isn’t wrong per se, but it does exclude one from certain activities, and there are actions that must be taken to restore the pure state. By the same token, being pure isn’t the same thing as being good. It is a state in which a person can participate fully in activities involving God.
There have been all kinds of attempts to explain why certain animals were “clean” for the Israelite and others were not. None of them hold much water. All we really know is that God said some animals could be eaten and others could not. One thing that is clear is that the dead bodies of animals are not something to be messing around with: they cause ritual impurity. Childbirth and the bodily processes associated with it are similar. Let’s see. Death. Birth. Bodily dysfunctions. Various animals. We’ve seen these things in the same place before. Genesis 3. The consequences of human independence. A divine curse. The purity laws, which I’m sorry to say will continue tomorrow, are a kind of reminder of these things. To be Holy, rather than Common, the people of Israel will need to be separate from the things that went terribly off track in Genesis 3. Those things are not wrong- in fact they are quite necessary- but they are damaged. They don’t function the way they were designed to in the beginning. God has already set his people apart from work (which was cursed but necessary) with the sabbath. Now he makes a further distinction between his people and the rest of the people. Purity is about making a distinction between the holy and the common.
Because the misuse of the purity concept is absurdly dangerous, it is worth taking a moment for two reminders. First, impure things are not by definition wrong things. It is not “wrong” for the Israelites to touch a dead body, get a skin disease, or have a child. All the purity laws say is that the people of Israel are to be aware that such things don’t quite match their design, and there are consequences to that. God is working out a new creation in their midst, but they are still living in the world broken by the human problem. These things are bound to happen, and God is giving the people methods and ground rules to restore purity from things that will occur, not forbidding them to do them. Second, these are for the people of Israel living in the wilderness of Sinai 3400 years ago, subject to a covenant with God. The are valuable for us to understand because we are reading through the story of those people and God’s work through them. They are not applicable to us. We are living in a time and place where the story has progressed a great deal, and we, thank God, are living under a different covenant, built on better promises.
Tomorrow we get to continue reading about impurity (woot!) and we’ll discuss the methods which God gave the people to restore purity, which will lead us up to the culmination of the book of Leviticus: the Day of Atonement.