One interesting statement deduced from Old Testament teaching that hit me in this section was, "He must keep separate what God created separate."  The purpose of separating, not mixing, knowing the difference between clean and unclean, were aids for understanding where man stood before God.  These were the ABCs of life and death.  I went and found the whole paragraph from which that sentence was taken.  The following is from Wenham, Leviticus p269.  Interesting.

  This is a review of Is God a Moral Monster by Paul Copan with study questions added to turn them into lessons.  These lessons are part of a wider study on Sanctification by Faith which has as its goal the fulfillment of Gal 5:16

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. 

  Because sanctification depends upon faith, doubt will be seen as a hindrance.  Misunderstanding can lead to doubt as well as ignorance, deception, and experience like - it doesn't feel right.  This lesson seeks to combat ignorance, deception, and misunderstanding.  By erasing these, our faith is free to function at a higher level.  

  I’ve set all of these studies in a specific order so that anyone may easily build on the foundation of Christ with the finest materials - gold, silver, and precious stones (1 Cor 3:10-13).  God has gifted the Church with amazing evangelists, pastors, and teachers to do the mining so that we have these materials to complete the building project. (Eph 4:11-16).  I invite you to study along with me.  You can see an overview of the complete Sanctification by Faith study here.  To go to the start of the current lesson (Is God a Moral Monster) click here. 

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thess 5:23 

Holiness in All of Life

The Israelites seemed to have laws covering everything—food laws, clothing laws, planting laws, civil laws, laws regarding marriage and sexual relations. These weren’t intended to be exhaustive. Rather, they were to be viewed first as visible reminders to live as God’s holy people in every area of life. There wasn’t any division between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane. God was concerned about holiness in all things—the major and the minor, the significant and the mundane. In such legislation, Israel was being reminded that she was different, a holy people set apart to serve God.^[1]

Holiness wasn’t just for official priests; it was for the entire people of Israel. In fact, they were called “a kingdom of priests” and “a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). Since God is holy or set apart, his people were to be so as well (Lev. 11:44).^[2] The Israelites were to be “marked off,” just as the Sabbath day was “marked off” or “set apart as holy” to the Lord (Gen. 2:3). We could rephrase the command “be holy, for I the Lord am holy” (Lev. 19:2) this way: “You shall be my people and mine alone, for I am your God and yours alone.”^[3] This relationship can be compared to the serious marriage vows we talked about earlier. Being God’s people meant living lives dedicated to God in every aspect of life.^[4]

This holiness wasn’t religious pretense—a phoniness that looked intact and decent on the outside but was cracked and rotting within. When God prescribed rituals, he wanted them to represent humility of heart and love for God and neighbor (Ps. 51:15-19). God hated rites like “festivals . . . solemn assemblies . . . burnt offerings and . . . grain offerings” when God’s people ignored “justice” and “righteousness” (Amos 5:21-24). Eating kosher foods and paying careful attention to rituals didn’t matter if the worship of God and the treatment of others weren’t kosher.^[5]

Food, clothing, and planting laws weren’t nitpicky commands God gave to oppress Israel. The prophets reminded her that God was primarily concerned about justice, mercy, and walking humbly before God (Deut. 10:12; Mic. 6:8). This underlying moral concern, however, didn’t cancel out ritual prescriptions—with their rich theological meaning—even much later in Israel’s history after the Babylonian exile.*

The Christian (and we could throw in the non-Christian too) should learn the lesson God wanted to teach ancient Israel: living under God’s reign should affect all of life.^[6] God’s presence permeates and saturates our world. Heaven and earth are full of his glory (Ps. 19:1-2; Isa. 6:3). God isn’t cordoned off to some private, religious realm. God is—either by direct control or divine permission so as not to violate human freedom—sovereignly at work in all the rhythms of creation and workings of human history. He’s weaving together a tapestry to bring all things to their climax in Christ. As the hymn writer put it, God “speaks to me everywhere.”^[7]

Clean and Unclean

We’ve heard the line “cleanliness is next to godliness.” In Old Testament times, this was closer to the truth than what we may think today. What does all this language of “cleanness” and “uncleanness” or “purity” and “impurity” mean? Why the ablutions for the pollutions? Why the need for purification? While we Westerners may think all of this strange, many other cultures—tribal, Islamic, Hindu—can more readily relate to such a picture. We’ll be helped by thinking in terms of analogies and symbolism—not in terms of arguments—in our effort to better understand purity laws and the notions of clean and unclean.

Cleanness and uncleanness are symbols or pictures, and the Hebrew idea of life and death is behind these pictures.^[8] For the Hebrew, life wasn’t mere biological existence. Humans could be biologically alive yet living in the realm of death—spiritual, moral, psychological/emotional ruin and alienation (e.g., Prov. 7:23-27). Uncleanness symbolizes loss of life.

Although many English translations use terms such as (un)cleanness or (im)purity, we shouldn’t think these refer to health and hygiene. That isn’t the case. Perhaps the term taboo—which suggests something nonmoral and perhaps mysterious that is off-limits regarding food, time, death, or sex—might capture this idea more effectively. A priest needed to be physically whole—without defect—so that the sanctuary of God might not become common. This doesn’t mean that a physical defect is sinful or wrong; being polluted isn’t identical to being immoral (although immorality brings pollution or is taboo). After all, animals that are taboo (unclean) are still part of God’s good creation. And when unclean, Israelites weren’t prohibited from worshiping God or even celebrating feasts—only from entering the sanctuary.^[9]

Furthermore, sex is a good gift from God and not sinful (within marriage), yet purification was necessary after sex so as to show the distinction between God and human beings. (Keep in mind that the various ancient Near Eastern gods engaged in all kinds of sexual activity, unlike the biblical God.)^[10]

Life, on the other hand, means being rightly connected to God and to the community—and properly functioning, whole, or well-ordered within (peace = shalom). As we’ll see, carnivorous animals, whether predators or scavengers, are connected with death and are therefore unclean. Ritual uncleanness in Israel was inevitable and frequent but not in itself sinful.^[11] Yet the ultimate concern behind cleanness, uncleanness, and holiness is the human heart—the very point Jesus made in Mark 7:14-23. And even though sin goes beyond ceremonial matters, it still defiles or pollutes us. Sin creates moral impurity or uncleanness before God. In the Old Testament, ethical concerns (sin) can’t be separated from matters of purity.^[12] Murder, for example, symbolically defiles or pollutes the land (Num. 35:33-34), and so it must be “cleansed.” The same can be said about the language of abomination; it has the same kind of overlap as uncleanness. Sometimes it refers to moral impurity, other times ceremonial impurity—and these categories aren’t always neatly distinguished in the Old Testament. To sum up, the law refers to two kinds of (im)purity: (1) ritual impurity (the result of contact with natural processes of birth, death, and sexual relations) and (2) moral impurity (through three serious sins in particular—idolatry, incest, and murder).^[13]

Again, cleanness was ultimately a heart issue.^[14] The nearer one came to God, the cleaner one had to be. Approaching God was serious business, and doing so called for self-scrutiny and preparation. The pursuit of cleanness was a kind of spiritual “dressing down”—an inner unveiling or internal examination of where one stood in relation to God.

Now, cleanness and uncleanness are opposite each other (Lev. 10:10), and Israelites could move in and out of these (temporary) states. In the course of life, they would become vulnerable to uncleanness. For example, an Israelite could touch a carcass or have a child and become unclean but then purify herself or offer a sacrifice and become clean again.

Cleanness and uncleanness are symbolic of life and death, respectively. Humans move between these two relative or temporary states (because of childbirth, male and female “issues,” contact with death, sinful acts); these states represent being with or without life. The stable status of holiness, on the other hand, reflects closeness to life found in God, and an Israelite had to be “clean” (and closer to life) in order to approach the tabernacle’s outer court; the high priest had to be clean and was specially set apart (“holy”) to enter the Holy of Holies just once a year. Holy articles such as the ark of the covenant and the Holy of Holies remained holy and did not become unclean—even if the sanctuary might be cleansed under unusual circumstances (for example, 2 Chron. 28:19). More clearly in the New Testament, Jesus—”the Holy and Righteous One” (Acts 3:14)—touched lepers and a hemorrhaging woman but remained unpolluted. The relationship between life and death, holiness, and cleanness/uncleanness is illustrated in the figure below:^[15]

Holiness came in degrees of set-apartness (e.g., the people, Levites, high priest). The closer an Israelite drew to a holy God (moving from the tabernacle’s/temple’s outer court to the Holy Place to the Holy of Holies), the more requirements he had to follow and precautions he had to take. At their consecration, high priests had special garments, washings, anointings with oil, and ceremonies that marked them as set apart. Nazirites (Num. 6) took sacred vows in consecration to God; this was shown by avoiding alcohol, haircuts, and contact with dead things. If someone from a priestly line couldn’t give evidence of his ancestry, he was considered unclean (Ezra 2:62)—unfit for closely approaching God. There was a hierarchy of holiness in Israel.

Not Getting Mixed Up with Others

Attentive parents will regularly tell their kids to avoid getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. Bad company corrupts good character (1 Cor. 15:33; cf. Ps. 1:1-2). Likewise, God gave the Israelites certain actions to carry out as a way of symbolically telling them not to get mixed in with the false ways of the nations. Israel “wore” certain badges of holy distinction that separated them from morally and theologically corrupted nations surrounding them; they were not to get “mixed in” with those nations’ mind-set and behavior.^[16] Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:9-11 prohibit mixed breeding and other attempts at mixing: no cross-breeding of cattle; no planting of different crops (“two kinds of seed”) in the same field (though this may refer to a Canaanite magical practice of the “wedding” of different seeds to conjure up fertile crops); no clothing with mixed fibers such as wool and linen (no polyesters!); and no plowing with both ox and donkey.*

The law also refers to improper sexual mixing as with adultery, incest, bestiality, and homosexuality, since these were viewed as crossing boundaries (Lev. 18:6-23).^[17] Likewise, because God created male and female (Gen. 1:26-27), wearing the clothes of a person from the opposite sex (by which divinely ordained sexual distinctions could be blurred or spheres crossed) was prohibited (Deut. 22:5). As we’ll see, the same applied to clean and unclean animals. These antimixing commands attempted to portray a sense of wholeness, completeness, and integrity.^[18] This is why the priest and the animal sacrifice weren’t allowed to have any physical deformity (Lev. 21:18-24; 22:18-26).

A number of scholars reasonably claim that God was reminding Israel of her own distinctive, holy calling even in the very foods Israel was to eat. Animals that “crossed” or in a sense “transgressed” the individual and distinctive spheres of air, water, or land were considered unclean. Gordon Wenham puts it this way:

“In creation God separated between light and darkness, waters and waters. This ban on all mixtures, especially mixed breeding, shows man following in God’s steps. He must separate what God created separate.”^[19]

Food laws—interwoven with many other Mosaic commands regarding purity—symbolized the boundaries God’s people were to keep before them:

• The sanctuary (tabernacle/temple): God’s visible presence was manifested there; this was his “habitation.” God gave laws to remind his people of their own set-apartness from all creation and how God was to be approached (e.g., priests as well as sacrificed animals had to be without defect or blemish).
• The land of Israel: The land of Israel was set in the midst of pagan nations with false gods, and thus there were certain commands that marked off the Israelites from other nations.

So Israel’s land, Israel’s sacrifices, and Israel’s food all had social and theological significance. Israel’s various boundaries were to remind her of her relationship to God and to the nations around her. Just as God was set apart from human beings, Israel was to be set apart in its behavior and theology from the surrounding nations. Just as the tabernacle represented sacred space within Israel, so the land of Israel itself represented a set-apartness in contrast to the nations around it.^[20]

I’ve tried to set the stage for discussing food and other purity laws in more detail. I’ll do so in the next chapter.

Further Reading

Hess, Richard S. “Leviticus.” In The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 1, edited by Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008.

Kiuchi, Nobuyoshi. Leviticus. Apollos Old Testament Commentary 3. Nottingham, UK: Apollos; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007.

Miller, Patrick. The Religion of Ancient Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000.

Wenham, Gordon J. Leviticus. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979.

Questions & Notes

1. Gordon J. Wenham, Leviticus, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 270. ↑

2. What does holiness mean? ↑

3. Richard Bauckham, The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989), 23. ↑

4. What is the relationship of God’s holiness to Israel’s? ↑

5. Goldingay, Israel’s Life, 131. ↑

6. Why did Israel have so many holiness laws? Why all the food, clothing, and planting regulations? ↑

7. Maltbie D. Babcock, “This Is My Father’s World” (1858-1901). ↑

8. Summarize what is meant by clean and unclean in the law of Moses. What is the significance of these categories? ↑

9. Goldingay, Israel’s Life, 130. ↑

10. Ibid., 609-15. ↑

11. Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39. ↑

12. Cyril S. Rodd, Glimpses of a Strange Land: Studies in Old Testament Ethics (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), 17. ↑

13. See chapter 1 in Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism. ↑

14. Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, Leviticus, Apollos Old Testament Commentary 3 (Nottingham, UK: Apollos; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 212-13. ↑

15. Ibid., 213. ↑

16. Wenham, Leviticus, 23. ↑

17. Timothy A. Lenchak, “Clean and Unclean,” in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 263. ↑

18. What is the relationship of clean and unclean animals to the spheres they inhabit? What message was God sending to Israel? ↑

19. Wenham, Leviticus, 269. ↑

20. David P. Wright, “Unclean and Clean (OT),” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 740. ↑

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