Re: Naked Bible 75: Leviticus 12-15
Last year I was wading through Heiser’s series on Leviticus. I didn’t cover much of it here, but picked out items of special interest. However, since that time, something he said in this particular episode sort of stewed away in the background of my conscious mind.
The issue was that Heiser wasn’t exactly too sure what Leviticus 15 was about, in the sense that he wasn’t too sure what was the common element that held it all together. He ended up supposing that it was some obscure notion of how they all represented losing something from your body as God made you that made you ceremonially disqualified from sacred space. We were defiled by incompleteness, or something like that.
I was not impressed. It seemed to be scratching for something very thin; it just didn’t hold together in my heart. Recently I was struck by something I felt was far more coherent.
The discharges from genitals, menses, even having sex, all made Israelis ceremonially unclean, at least temporarily. But what holds them all together is that they come with mortality. Those bodily functions don’t happen to immortals. If you are eternal, sex is wholly unnecessary. There’s no need for procreation. Jesus mentioned this regarding angels.
The key issue is that these things mark us as mortals. They are significant symbols of the need to breed and replace ourselves. We are no longer in Eden. They are reminders of the Fall, markers of what the Fall did to us.
Thus, it makes sense that God would want to require some kind of ritual offering and a period of isolation while we contemplate what we have lost. We are mortals; we are burdened with a fleshly form that is constantly trying to get us into trouble with God. It is the greatest ally of Satan and we are dragging it around with us everywhere we go. These ritual observances helped the Israelis to keep alive an otherworldly orientation, longing to return to Eden.
