One of the difficulties in sorting out Old Testament legal material is that we misunderstand the reasons behind its various formulations. Thus, we have Jews who to this day follow a kosher lifestyle, and others who may still be people of faith but who don't observe those old laws. Christians, by and large, have relegated most of the Holiness Code to the culturally-bound trash heap, although some still distinguish between ritual laws which no longer apply, and moral ones that do.
I want to spend a little more time on this because of the view of many Christians that homosexuality is immoral and that the only legitimate marriage is between a man and a woman, based to a large extent on the teaching in Leviticus 18 and 20, as well as Romans 1. It is this very view that is arousing such animosity among those critics who want to deny Trinity Western University, my old employer, the right to found a law school.
Of the many (613 to be exact) Mosaic laws that defined Israelite life in the ancient near east, a good number of them served as, for want of a better expression, identity markers. Keep in mind what I said in an earlier post--when the Israelites left Egypt for the Promised Land, they were by and large "Egyptianized", when it came to everyday life. There was not much that made them stand out from the dominant Egyptian culture. Many would not even have been monotheistic. Therefore, having taken the Israelites out of Egypt, God took the further step of taking Egypt out of the Israelites through a series of laws, commemorative feasts, even physical markings. Circumcision was one such example of these markers, the 10 Commandments another, Passover and the other sacred festivals a third. They built a sense of national identity and solidarity, and firmly established Yahweh (or Jehovah) as the one true God.
Other laws had to do with issues of being clean and unclean. This had nothing to do with physical cleanliness per se, or even with moral purity. The issue was one of ritual purity; i.e., being in a state of readiness to participate in religious rites. To be unclean didn't necessarily mean that you had committed a sin, but only that you were not in a fit state to worship.
[Editorial note: In my fundamentalist upbringing, fitness for worship included a jacket and tie for the males, and appropriate dresses or skirts for the females. But I digress :-).]
There were an amazing number of normal and completely acceptable human activities (e.g., a husband and wife having intercourse) that rendered a person unclean--not sinful, remember, just ritually unprepared for worship. For each there was an appropriate regimen that had to be followed to rid oneself of this ritual impurity. Here is a helpful list from BibleStudyTools.com:
In Old Testament times the ordinary state of most things was "cleanness," but a person or thing could contract ritual "uncleanness" (or "impurity") in a variety of ways: by skin diseases, discharges of bodily fluids, touching something dead (Num 5:2 ), or eating unclean foods (Lev 11 ; Deut 14 ).
An unclean person in general had to avoid that which was holy and take steps to return to a state of cleanness. Uncleanness placed a person in a "dangerous" condition under threat of divine retribution, even death (Lev 15:31 ), if the person approached the sanctuary. Uncleanness could lead to expulsion of the land's inhabitants (Lev 18:25 ) and its peril lingered upon those who did not undergo purification (Lev 17:16 ; Num 19:12-13 ).
Priests were to avoid becoming ritually defiled (Leviticus 21:1-4; Leviticus 21:11-12 ), and if defiled, had to abstain from sacred duties. An unclean layperson could neither eat nor tithe consecrated food (Lev 7:20-21 ; Deut 26:14 ), had to celebrate the Passover with a month's delay (Num 9:6-13 ), and had to stay far away from God's tabernacle (Num 5:3 ).
Purification varied with the severity of the uncleanness. The most serious to least serious cases in descending order were: skin disease (Lev. 13-14), childbirth (Lev. 12), genital discharges (Leviticus 15:3-15; Leviticus 15:28-30 ), the corpse-contaminated priest (Eze 44:26-27 ), the corpse-contaminated Nazirite (Nu 6:9-12 ), one whose impurity is prolonged (Lev 5:1-13 ), the corpse-contaminated layperson (Num 5:2-4 ; 19:1-20 ), the menstruating woman (Lev 15:19-24 ), the handling of the ashes of the red cow or the Day of Atonement offerings (Leviticus 16:26; Leviticus 16:28 ; Num 19:7-10 ), emission of semen (Lev 15:16-18 ), contamination by a carcass (Lev 11:24-40 ; 22:5 ), and secondary contamination (Lev 15 ; 22:4-7 ; Num 19:21-22 ).
Purification always involved waiting a period of time (until evening for minor cases, eighty days for the birth of a daughter), and could also involve ritual washings symbolizing cleansing, atoning sacrifices, and priestly rituals. "Unclean" objects required purification by water (wood, cloth, hide, sackcloth) or fire (metals), or were destroyed (clay pots, ovens), depending on the material (Lev 11:32-35 ; Num 31:21-23 ).
What could possibly be wrong with sexual relations? or menstruation? or childbirth, for Pete's sake?
Why should I be able to eat chicken but not pork? Couldn't one just slap a bandage on that skin problem and head off to the Tabernacle? Because these things made me sinful? Not at all. Their reasons were symbolic, as BibleStudyTools.com goes on to explain: The purity system conveys in a symbolic way that Yahweh was the God of life and was separated from death. Most of the unclean animals were either predators/scavengers or lived in caves (e.g., rock badgers). The pig, moreover, was associated with the worship of Near Eastern chthonic deities (i.e., spirits of the underworld). Leprosy made a person waste away like a corpse (Nu 12:12 ). Bodily discharges (blood for women, semen for men) represented a temporary loss of strength and life and movement toward death. Because decaying corpses discharged, so natural bodily discharges were reminders of sin and death. Physical imperfections representing a movement from "life" toward "death" moved a person ritually away from God who was associated with life. Purification rituals symbolized movement from death toward life and accordingly involved blood, the color red, and spring (lit. "living") water, all symbols of life (underlining is mine).Please remember that a ritually impure person did not have to repent as such. There was no sin in play, and therefore no required contrition. But a ritual purification was necessary as outlined above.
That's why I said that Jesus must have often been unclean. He didn't avoid lepers (skin disease being the worst form of uncleanness); he touched and healed them. Dead bodies? He raised them from the dead. A woman with chronic menstruation grabs his robe--no problem. She is healed as well. Jesus was, from time to time, unclean, yet without sin.
And here is another curious point--many of these unclean entities,
experiences, and behaviours were called abominations. An abomination
that wasn't a sin!
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