Leviticus Pt 3

 

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116 Verses All About Leprosy

and

Just 33 Verses about Bodily Discharges

I'm going to try to make this brief, mostly because it's all kinda gross.

    Chapters 13 and 14 are all about leprosy, which I guess was a pretty big deal back in the day, so I can understand why God wants Moses and Aaron to have the latest medical info in order to keep the troops safe. And honestly, I would be interested to know how all the godly advice presented here jibes with modern science. Not that I'm going to call an expert or Google it, because I've got other things I want to do today, like practice on my alto recorder. So for now let's just have a quick look at the material as presented in Leviticus.

    There is a lot of "how to diagnose" material here and we won't go into anywhere near all of it, because like I said, it's kinda gross. A lot is what to look for in skin color, hair color, does a rash appear to go deep or is it kinda superficial, that sort of thing. The point here seems to be God wants Moses and Aaron to be able to tell the difference between leprosy and, let's say a bad case of carpet burn or a big hickey. 

    And it must be noted that God expects all of the leprosy diagnosis and treatment to be handled by the priests, aka Aaron and Sons, which makes me wonder if they would have signed up for the gig if they knew this was part of the job description. Of course, they probably didn't think being incinerated was part of the company disciplinary code until they saw what happened to Nadab and Abihu, so what's one more surprise?

    Anyway, if a itchy, rashy parishioner presents him or herself to the priest and is found to have hair in the diseased area that has turned white and the rash is "deeper than the skin of his body", or any of the other signs that God spells out that indicate a by golly case of leprosy or, even worse, spreading leprosy, he is to enforce a 14 day period of quarantine, which seems like a reasonable thing to me.

    There isn't much of anything offered up here beyond the diagnosis, quarantine, and some washing up advice. Absolutely nothing helpful regarding treatment, which to me is puzzling. I mean you'd figure that if anyone knows how to put together a good treatment regimen it's gotta be the Almighty, but I guess he just wants to see how long it's going to take his Finest Creation to come up with the multi-drug therapy of dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine on their own. Turns out it took about thirty-five centuries, give or take.

    There were a couple of verses that stood out to me so I'd like to share them here.

40 If anyone loses the hair from his head, he is bald but he is clean.

45 The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, "Unclean, unclean."

    Do with these verses as you will.

    The inspection process for garments is also covered in Chapter 13. Proper disposal of clothing deemed to be irredeemably unclean is by fire. No word on whether God finds the odor pleasing.

    Chapter 14 moves on to consider any dwellings that might have a leprosy germ or three hanging about and gives instructions on what the priests (these guys have a really wide ranging area of responsibilities that I hope is reflected in the compensation package.) need to do in first determining if said domicile is truly contaminated, and then what to do about it in the way of removing and disposing of any befouled materials. A lot of the recommendations seem pretty spot on, but God once again follows them up with the old flinging about of bird blood trick and I think we can agree that that part of the process has worn out its welcome here in the 21st century and thank goodness for that.

    Finally for today, we have Chapter 15, which is titled "Concerning Bodily Discharges" so you know a good time is to be had. 

    The first fifteen verses are concerned with unspecified discharges from a man's "member". As far as what the discharge itself is, I'm guessing we're talking about...oh, hell, I don't know what we're talking about, I'm not a urologist. STD's maybe? UTI's? Too much asparagus for dinner the previous evening? I have no idea. 

    What I did learn from this chapter is that there is a lot of cleaning with water to be done, and it's best to avoid everything that the discharging man has worn, touched, sat on, drunk out of, or rode on. And, no surprise, once an eight day ritual of laundry and bathing has been observed, a bird or two needs to have its head wrung off and blood flung about the room. You know, on second thought maybe we are missing something here in modern times, blinded by our own antipathy to the cleansing properties of bird blood.

    

    Or maybe not.

    Verses 16-18 are all about semen. For example:

18 If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening.

    Sounds okay. Play a bit of hide the sausage, then splash around in the tub for a while. Once again "until the evening" is mentioned. That phrase is used what seems like dozens of times in reference to when you can consider yourself to be a socially presentable human being after having had sex or touched a dead weasel or sat on a chair that had been previously sat on by a dude having discharges (yuck) or any number of incidents requiring a sanitation reset.

    I guess I should look it up.....

    .....Okay, according to gotquestions.org, "Your questions, Biblical answers", the evening, or sunset, marked the end of the old day and beginning of the new day for the ancient Israelites. That's interesting, and I suppose a new day brings new beginnings, so we'll just leave it at that.

    The rest of this chapter deals with a woman's menstrual discharge. Consistent with the way women have been presented so far in the Bible, this is described as the time of her "impurity" and not only is the woman considered unclean, meaning she's not welcome at church services, but so is darned near everything she may have touched whilst going around being impure. And if she happens to do some serious canoodling with her husband or boyfriend during this time of impurity not only is he unclean for a week, so is the bed he sleeps on and the donkey he rode into town. Unclean. Wash up. Wait until...seven days has passed. A whole week of evenings/

    And just as I was wondering what sort of consequences might befall someone who dares darken the doorway of the tabernacle in a state of uncleanness, along comes verse 31.

31 Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, so that they do not die in the uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.

    So there you have it. Just as failing to eat your goat meat** at the proper time can get you killed, so can showing up for services after a roll in the hay if you haven't washed up and waited until evening.

*I figured a pretty picture of a flower might take some of the "ick" factor out of today's subject matter.

**As we all found out in Leviticus Pt. 2