Leviticus II: The List of Holy Food Aversions, Misogyny Laws, and Deuteronomic Dermatology (Chps. 11- 15)

Chp. 11

God tells Moses and Aaron: it's all right eating any cloven-hooved, cud-chewing animals except camels, rock badgers, hares, and pigs. Not that rock badgers or hares chew cuds, but God seems to believe they do. Touching the carcasses of these animals makes you unclean.

Ditto for any aquatic animals lacking fins and scales: abominations all. Although if it had existed at the time, I feel God really should have made an exception for Bubba Gump shrimp.

Abominable birds are: eagles, vultures, ospreys, kites, falcons, ravens, ostriches, nighthawks, seagulls, hawks, owls, cormorants, ibises, water hens, pelicans, carrion vultures, storks, herons, hoo-poes, and bats.

And now we see why Christians have so much trouble understanding evolutionary biology: they think bats are birds.

You should check out a picture of the hoo-poe, by the way - he's rather a wacky-looking little guy.

"All winged insects that go upon all fours shall be an abomination to you." (11:20)
Which is another reason Christians have trouble understanding evolutionary biology: they cannot count to six. Show me an insect with four legs and I will show you something that is not an insect.

Oh, but speaking of these unclean winged insects that go on all fours, it is all right to eat locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers. Yech: God won't let me eat shrimp, but he wants me noshing down on crickets?

Question: if locusts make for good eating, how did a plague of them in Egypt constitute a famine?

If you touch the carcass of an unclean animal, you'll be unclean till that night. Unclean animals also include the following "swarming things that swarm upon the earth": weasels, mice, great lizards, geckos, crocodiles, lizards, sand lizards, and the chameleon. Just to repeat, if you touch any of these animals' carcasses you will be unlcean till night. As is any object unclean that touches their carcasses. If an unclean animal's carcass falls into an earthenware pot or jar, you must break that pot or jar. If one of their carcasses touches an oven or stove, you must smash that oven or stove. But if one of their carcasses falls into a well - okay, well, a well's not really expendable, so you can look the other way on that one. You can also give a pass to any seeds touched by the carcasses of unclean animals... unless the seeds have had water poured on them. Odd distinction, that.

Clean animals that die natural deaths are unclean. Gotta slaughter them to eat them.

Swarming things shall not be eaten. You shall not eat swarming things. Swarming things that swarm upon the earth you shall not eat. For swarming things are an abomination. You will not make yourself abominable by eating a swarming thing. For I am the LORD your god, and I am holy. You will not defile yourself by eating a swarming thing that swarms upon the earth. For I am the LORD your god. And I am holy.

So, you know, do not eat swarming things.

...By the way, was anybody tempted in the first place? Good grief, they'll give you $50,000 on Fear Factor to eat balut, but God feels he needs to order me nine times in a row not to put centipedes in my mouth?

Chp. 12

When a woman gives birth, she is unclean for a week. Unless the baby's a girl: then make it two.

Wow, that is a riot.

When real babies are born (male ones), they are to have their penises chopped up on the eighth day. The mother remains in a state of "blood purification" for 33 days afterward, apparently meaning she can't touch anything hallowed, or enter a sanctuary. The purification period lasts 66 days if she births a girl.

When her blood purification phase is finished, mom must bring a yearling lamb to the Tent of Meeting for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering. If she's poor, the lamb can be swapped out for two birds.

Chp. 13

So. Leprosy. It's a big subject in Leviticus. Seems you could barely sling around the blood of a sacrificial hoo-poe in those days without splashing a leper or two.

But how do you know if you've got leprosy? You could just be suffering from acne, after all, or eczema. Few things were more embarrassing in biblical times than to call in the exorcist to tackle a malady perfectly treatable with Stridex.

Well here's how it works. When you discover you have a lesion or a skin eruption, do not consult a dermatologist. For I am the LORD your god, and dermatologists are an abomination unto you. Skin problems are what priests are for. So have a priest look at the thing. If what you've got is acne, you will be quarantined seven days, checked in on, then quarantined seven more. But if the discoloration runs deep into the skin and has white hair, or if you don't improve under quarantine, you have leprosy. Leprosy consists in localized or bodywide raw skin which sprouts whitened hair. If the raw skin itself turns white, you're healed. Unless, of course, the leprous disease has erupted from within a boil: in that case whitened skin means leprosy. A white-haired raw spot emerging from a burn is leprosy. A deep-skin diseasedness of the head or beard marked by itchiness and yellowed hair - that's leprosy. Dull white spots on the skin, however, are tetter, not leprosy, which is cool. Don't fret tetter.

This stuff is complicated, man. Which is why you must trust your diagnosis and care to a trained professional witch-doctor. Or, depending on your preference of ethnographical terminology, "priest".

This part is cute: "If a man's hair has fallen from his head, he is bald but he is clean." (13:41) Thanks, God, I appreciate that.

So with our diagnosing squared away, how does one cure leprosy? Well, this is the really great part, because you know that when your course of medical treatment has been prescribed directly by the LORD, you're talking about some seriously high-quality healthcare. None of your HMO garbage or your Democratic-Party-bureaucrat-run-socialized-medicine stuff, no sir.

Here's how it works. If you have leprosy, you are to wear shredded clothing, grow your hair long, and wail, "Unclean! Unclean!" wherever you go. Also, you must live by yourself in a hovel outside town.

(P.S. If there is leprous disease in a garment, the garment is to be shut up seven days in a box or something. If it's still leprous-looking after seven days - whatever it means for a garment to have leprosy in the first place - you burn it; if not, wash it. If the garment gets leprous again after being washed, burn it.)

Chp. 14

Now you didn't think, did you, that if a fellow has leprosy all God wants himto do is to move out of town? Surely you must have known that a whole mess of animals was going to have to get chopped up at some point.

If while living out of town a man experiences a sponteneous remission of his leprosy, the priest will come out to to make a house call, or a hovel call, bearing two birds, cedarwood,"scarlet stuff", and hyssop. Now hyssop is a mediterranean flower: what thr scarlet stuff is we are not told. Over running water, the priest kills one bird in an earthenware jar, splashes bird-blood onto the second bird, which he then shakes (the second bird, that is) to sprinkle the ex-leper, releasing the second bird and pronouncing the man clean in the process.

Have you ever heard of anything so incredible? I mean, wow - one of the birds gets away.

But of course we're not finished. The ex-leper must shave all his body hair, including eyebrows, and though he can come back to town, he must sleep outside his tent for a week; afterward he has to shave again and give up two male lambs, a female lamb, and a cereal offering at the Tent of Meeting (I'm sure he has plenty of spare livestock on the farm after his long exile from town). There's a lot of very particular smearing of blood and oil which occurs in this celebration-of-leprosy-remission sacrifice, incluing wiping blood and oil on the ex-leper's right ear, right thumb, and right hallux (big toe), and sending out seven shakes of oil as a wave offering, and so on and so on and so on and so on. And so on. And so on and so on. But perhaps this time I will spare us the details.

Now - what, we've all been wondering for awhile now, does a person do if his house has leprosy? Well, "he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, 'There seems to me to be some sort of disease in my house.'" (14:36) Then you empty that house of all your possessions, and have the priest over: if he sees red or green spots on the wall, the house is sealed up for seven days. If that doesn't help, all the stonework of the house is replaced and the plaster scraped and replastered. If the leprosy ever returns, the house must then be fully razed. But, whatever steps you have to take, once your house has been declared clean of leprosy don't forget to wander from room to room slinging bird blood all over the place!

Question: from the sound of it, I had gathered that the Israelites were living in tents at this time. But now we're hearing about homes constructed from stone, timber, and plaster. Which is it, or how did it work, or were maybe these laws just cobbled together over the course of a thousand years and then written down to appear as if they'd existed from the tent-dwelling days of yore when in many cases they took shape at a much later, home-dwelling date?

Chp. 15

Semen is unclean. If a man ejaculates, he is unclean and his bed and clothes and anything he sits on are unclean. Anyone touching him is unclean. Anyone he spits on is unclean. Earthenware vessels touched by him must be broken, unless he's first washed his hands. He and all the people he touches must bathe, wash their clothes, and all of them remain unclean until nightfall.

Our ejaculator, after washing himself, must wait seven days, and then sacrifice two turtledoves or pigeons, one as a sin offering and another as burnt.

Now I'm looking over a couple of different translations of this and find the rules somewhat confusing. This post-ejaculatory purification is quite a lot of bother to go to, to the point of being wholly impracticable by anybody with a sex drive greater than the pope's. By the time you're seven days out from the orgasm in question, and ready to sacrifice two pigeons to clean your slate, I'd think odds are you'll already be in debt to God for another several dozen birds.

But finally we get this - "If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the evening." (15:19) This is given separately from the rest, and suggests to me that the sacrifices are only required to atone for ejaculation occurring outside of a woman. As has been said elsewhere, every sperm is sacred.

But maybe that's not the correct interpretation, and the cleanliness laws around ejaculation really are onerously impractical, because the menstruation regulations sure are tough to obey as well. A woman is, of course, unclean during menstruation and at any other time she has a blood discharge. And so on with everything and everyone she touches, which must be variously washed or broken or discarded as appropriate. But when her period is finished, she waits seven more days and on the eighth gives up the familiar old two-turltedove sacrifice. It's a whole lot of birds getting killed all the time, I'll say that. And it's a whole lot of time for women to be untouchables - getting close to half of their time, once you tack a week onto the end of each menstrual cycle.

Here's a very nice review of what we've just discussed....