Leviticus 15

Leviticus 15:1-15

Leviticus 15:1-15. Discharges from Males.—These are evidently regarded as abnormal. The greatest care is taken to mark the contagion arising from them. Keener precautions could not be taken with what is the most loathsome disease of our modern civilisation. The bed, the seat, anyone who has touched the bed or the seat or the afflicted person himself, or has been touched by his saliva, is infected. In each case of infection, washing and seclusion for the rest of the day is prescribed; wooden vessels are to be rinsed, earthenware (cf.

Leviticus 6:28, Leviticus 11:33) to be destroyed. The infected person himself, however, when free, is simply to wait for a week, wash his clothes and his body in running water; on the next day he offers a sin offering and a burnt offering in resuming his intercourse with holy things. Only small birds are needed for this purpose (cf. Leviticus 12:8).

Leviticus 15:16-18

Leviticus 15:16-18. Emissions, Voluntary or Otherwise.—Here only washing is needed. The existence of the first part of the law may well help to allay the horror with which the phenomenon is often needlessly regarded. In the second part, there is no suggestion of sin, as in the writings of Augustine and other fathers, or in the medieval deductions from Genesis 3. Cf., however, Exodus 19:15, 1 Samuel 21:5, 2 Samuel 11:11, 1 Corinthians 7:5, Revelation 14:4; in the OT passages the ritual aspect of the act is emphasized, in the NT the moral. To primitive thought, the act has its significance for good or evil quite apart from considerations of wedlock (cf. also Leviticus 15:24).

Leviticus 15:19-24

Leviticus 15:19-24. Here the ceremonial has become almost identical with what would now be considered the hygienic. The prescriptions for infected persons are the same as those in Leviticus 15:1-15. Leviticus 15:24 conveys a very salutary caution: contrast Leviticus 20:18—the two cases, however, may not be the same. The impurity is held to disappear of itself after an interval of a week from its beginning.

Leviticus 15:25-30

Leviticus 15:25-30. Abnormal Prolongation of Discharge.—Here the treatment of the patient is identical with that of the man in Leviticus 15:1-15. In neither case, however, is any “treatment” in the modern sense of the word mentioned. Even if the law is by implication hygienic, it is not medical.

Leviticus 15:31-33

Leviticus 15:31-33. Conclusion.—These five chapters, and especially the last, throw a strong light on the conception of sin in P. Sin is not an act, but a condition. The sacrifices prescribed for it are not punishments, nor even methods of escape, but means by which, the abnormal conditions gone, the functions of the normal can be safely resumed. But the connexion of the abnormal, as well as the strictly pathological, with a sense of sin and guilt, is a truth familiar to psychology, and is illustrated by common feelings about all four of the cases in Leviticus 15. But, in fairness to P, it must be remembered that P does not brand as sins, in our modern sense, acts or states for which the individual cannot be held responsible; it simply asserts that they necessitate ritual seclusion, and that escape from them demands the performance of certain ceremonies not by any means particularly burdensome.