There is a process for coming back and being a real human being again after you’ve had an infectious skin disease. If your symptoms go away then you can meet with the priests again and they can check you over to see if you’re still rashy. I’ve heard the kosher laws praised for how they anticipate germ theory and modern health and safety customs, like how you’re not supposed to have anything to do with dead things or people with communicable rashes, but I feel, based on what I’m seeing so far, that we might be reaching a little bit there. Honestly, as a society, it doesn’t take long to figure out that, for whatever reason, people who mess around with dead animals are not usually very healthy, and that poking at someone’s oozing sore is a good way to get one of your own. Where the rules get more specific regarding actual treatments and practices, they are not that great. If you fish a dead skink out of your rain barrel, the water it was floating in is unclean and you can’t drink it…until that evening when it becomes okay again. Similarly, chapter 14 outlines the process by which the priest make someone ritualistically clean who had had a skin disease and it doesn’t sound any different to me than any other ancient magic spells. The priests had to cut up a bird over some water and then put in the live bird along with some cedar wood, hyssop and red yarn, then sprinkle the potion on the sick man seven times. There are more steps after that, many, many more steps, but you get the idea.
We have not by any means mastered the science of medicine in our current era, but none of that stuff seems very helpful for skin conditions. I don’t know, maybe in another couple thousand years we’ll learn that cedar wood and scared doves are wonder cures for shingles, but I’m going to wait until then to start ascribing that level of practical foresight to the Levitical laws.
Some similar laws are given about mildew in one’s household for later when everyone eventually makes it to Canaan and gets to live in permanent dwellings. These are actually pretty practical sounding though. Go tell the priest about it, then scrape it all out, cut it out of the wall if you have to. Basically you have to keep tearing out larger and larger chunks of your home until the priests are sure all the mildew is gone. If you get a really nasty patch you may have to destroy the whole building and move.
Any kind of discharge makes you unclean as well as pretty much anything that comes in contact with you. And anyone who comes in contact with anything that’s come in contact with you. If you’re a woman then you’re super unclean and no one can touch you while you’re menstruating and then you’re just regular unclean for another week after that. Then you can go make a sacrifice at the temple to become clean again until your next cycle. So no matter what, you’re unclean or worse for two weeks out of every month and then it takes a moderately expensive sacrifice (2 doves) to be clean again. I wonder how common it was for families to just skip it and let the women just be unclean all the time. I mean that adds up, and it’s not like women in the ancient world got to go out much anyway.
You’re also unclean for the rest of the day any time you have sex and there is a discharge of semen. Semen makes things unclean. I wonder if all the cool kids, when they first got married, would strut around camp all like “sorry guys, I’d like to go to temple with you, but, you know, I’m unclean right now.” *wink*
No comments:
Post a Comment