| AN INVISIBLE DANGER |
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| Why All the Rules? As germs are to a surgeon, "uncleanness" is to Leviticus. Chapters 11-15 describe elaborate precautions - what animals to avoid and how to treat "unclean" skin disease, mildeweed clothing or walls, and bodily emissions. Scholars point out that many clean and unclean rules have good health habits behind them, such as the rule to quarantine a person with an infectious disease or the rule against eating pork (which carries many parasites). Others say that dietary laws were meant to keep the Israelites apart from their neighbors. Pigs were prominent in Caananite worship: therefore the Israelites were not to eat them. A different dietary standard would keep the two groups from mixing socially, for a meal was always part of Middle Eastern hospitality. Still other scholars suggest that the uncleanness rules simply fit into what Israelites intuitively thought proper. God was reinforcing a natural sense of repulsion toward creeping insects, scavenger birds, bodily emissions, and skin diseases. The Habit of Carefulness All these explanations have merit, but the underlying basis of clean and unclean was religious. Being unclean was not dangerous or wrong. In fact, you could hardly avoid it. Practically everyone became "unclean" from time to time. But you could not worship God in the Tent of Meeting while you were unclean, nor bring anything unclean into the presence of God. His holiness would destroy it - and you (Leviticus 15:31). So Leviticus trains God's people to watch their lives as carefully as surgeons watch their sterile technique. They must develop the habit of carefulness, even about something they cannot see or feel. They must think about preparing |
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