An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 21: Weeping sores and many other things that ooze and seep (Leviticus 11-15)

Leviticus 11-15
Weeping sores and many other things that ooze and seep.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Leviticus 11

“Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.”

Dietary requirements are covered in this chapter. The first proscription is that only beasts that chew the cud and have cloven hooves may be eaten. So not rabbits, that chew the cud (well, technically they don’t as they eat their poo rather than regurgitate) but don’t have cloven hooves, and pigs, which have cloven feet (but not hooves) but don’t chew the cud. Camels are forbidden on the basis of their feet –I suppose they aren’t exactly hooves, I don’t know how finely the rules are splitting this thing.

Anything from the sea with fins and scales can be eaten, everything else cannot. Do you like moules mariniere? Tough. There’s a comprehensive and seemingly arbitrary list of birds that cannot be eaten. Arbitrary, I guess, because unlike the preceding two, there’s no characteristics specified that make a bird clean or unclean. Not only “owls” get a mention but also “little owl” and “great owl”, just to be sure. Lapwings, cuckoos and eagles are likewise safe. Birds that “creep upon all fours” are an abomination. And a freak of bloody nature too – what manner of beast is this really meant to represent? Bats, maybe?

But it’s okay to eat locusts and beetles, because they have “legs above their feet”, which makes me wonder what things don’t. But other things that “creep” (e.g. snail, ferret, tortoise, mole) are forbidden. To be honest, there’s nothing on that list that I’d eat, they may as well replace “unclean” with “disgusting, don’t bother”.

The rest of the chapter is a discussion on clean/unclean practices in removal of animal carcasses, unclean meats and the various ritual precautions that must be taken if they touch a person or an item. Whilst many of these make sense from a food hygiene point of view (like not drinking water that’s had dead things in), the constant repetition of the word “unclean” begins to make it sound like an OCD sufferer having a breakdown.

Leviticus 12

“But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days.”

A very short chapter, only 8 verses, which basically says that a woman is unclean for about a month after giving birth, and at the end of that time must sacrifice a goat, or two turtles (turtle doves again?) or pigeons. Dirty women. Know your place, you foul females with your messy biological functions.

Leviticus 13

“When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy; then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the priests:”

Talking of disgusting biology, this chapter is quite an extensive treatise on how to tell a boil from leprosy (basically it depends on the presence of white hairs or not, which doesn’t sound like either ailment to me). Isolation for seven days is required to see how the lesions develop, and if it becomes leprosy this is where the old tradition of lepers chanting “unclean, unclean” comes from.

Now, the thing is, what’s being described here isn’t leprosy, it sounds more like a kind of pox, so I’m guessing that some kind of translation error or decision led to probably millions of people with a disease that is, in fact, not particularly contagious, being treated as pariahs for centuries. Nice going folks.

The chapter gets weirder when it starts discussing items having “leprosy”, which are basically stains or discolourations. Coupled with the requirements that sacrificial animals must be free from blemish, I think what we’re seeing here is a conflation of reasonably sensible hygiene precautions with a concept of ritual purity, which unfortunately has come to impart a moral dimension to disease, as if the person infected has become ill because they are immoral. What a good job we’re all so much more enlightened these days, right?

Still, it’s not all bad news. I was pleased to read that “he that hath his hair fallen off from the part of his head toward his face, he is forehead bald: yet is he clean.”, so screw all you blotchy freaks. I may be a slaphead but at least I’m not a leper.

Leviticus 14

“And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean: and after that he shall come into the camp, and shall tarry abroad out of his tent seven days.”

More “leprosy” antics. In this case, if someone comes back cured of his leprosy unknown skin disease there are series of offerings to be made and rituals to fulfil. I won’t list them all, but essentially animal sacrifice and anointing with blood and oil are involved, as are hyssop and cedar wood.

That takes up most of the chapter, the second half is dealing with “leprosy” in a house, which you can tell from red and green streaks on the walls. This smacks of sympathetic magic – a blotchy environment must cause blotchy skin disease, and is a good example of What You Are Talking About: You Don’t Know It. I imagine the fact that this kind of nonsense features in the bible led people down a scientifically and medically unsound path for centuries. The fact that the streaky walls could have been caused by health-damaging conditions such as damp and mildew or certain chemicals leaching out of stone and mortar also probably meant that it worked enough times to make people believe that it was a sound method.

 Leviticus 15

“Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.”

More biology. This chapter, as the quote suggests, deals with how to deal with things that “issue” out of people. Initially this seems to imply weeping sores, and here all the various washing precautions are pretty sensible and medically sound. The chapter then extends the same principles to semen (which is referred to as “seed of copulation”) and menstrual blood , which is also referred to as “flowers” – I thought that “red flower” was a euphemism employed only by Cersei Lannister but it looks like George RR Martin was using biblical inspiration.

These latter two beliefs are pretty common in magical thinking, since these fluids are closely linked to the forces of procreation and thus must be “charged” with life in some way and thus dangerous to misuse.