Introduction
PURITY AND IMPURITY IN PERSONS.
The code of ceremonial purity now advances from animals to persons, and sets forth the causes of their ceremonial defilement. These causes are suggestive of moral pollutions staining and disfiguring the soul. They arise from childbirth, leprosy, and certain secretions, to which is added, in Numbers 19:11-16, the pollution of touching a human corpse. There are other sources of sanitary impurity and moral defilement, the omission of which argues that those here prohibited are forbidden not for the promotion of cleanliness merely, or even for good morals, but to inculcate a higher symbolical meaning, and to lead the people up to the conception of spiritual purity. This chapter relates to women after childbirth.
CONCLUDING NOTES.
(1.) An arithmetical difficulty is suggested in view of the great number of births among so large a population, and the small number of priests available for the performance of so many ceremonial purifications. The most reasonable solution of the difficulty is the theory that, in the abnormal life in the wilderness, where a majority were scattered in distant portions of the Sinaitic peninsula, (see Introduction to Numbers xx,) the sacrifices were infrequent and irregularly celebrated. Amos 5:25-26, intimates an omission of offerings.
(2.) Childbirth, the mysterious beginning of an endless stream of blissful or woful being, is here properly invested with a deep religious solemnity. No event in the physical world, not even its creation, is comparable to this, for creation is the handiwork of God, while the babe is his image, godlike in spirituality, immortality, personality, freedom, and moral nature. The significance of this event is painfully intensified by the consideration, plainly hinted in this chapter, that the human soul from its very beginning tends to flow downward to its lowest possible level, by an ineradicable proclivity, which only a supernatural grace, through the blood of sprinkling, largely available to the child through the faithfulness of the parents, can effectually reverse. Parentage involves a tremendous responsibility, inasmuch as it peoples heaven or hell. It is a remark of Oehler that “Mosaism, although it derives the propagation of man’s race from God’s blessing, still regards all events and conditions which refer to birth and generation as requiring a purifying expiation, because of the disturbance of sin.” Circumcision, called by Ewald “the offering of the body,” supposes that the natural life is corrupted by impurity, which must be purged before man can be brought into covenant with Jehovah. This is done in such a way as declares that the propagation of the race is sacred to him. Says Abarbanel, “As no one bears pains and troubles in this world without guilt, and as there is no chastisement without sin, and lastly, as every woman bears children with pain and danger, hence every one is commanded, after childbirth, to offer an expiatory sacrifice.” Leyrer remarks, that this and all other rites of purification were intended “to foster the constant humiliation of fallen man; to remind him in all the leading processes of life generation, birth, eating, disease, death how every thing, even in his own bodily nature, lies under the curse of sin. so that the law might become a schoolmaster to bring unto Christ.”
(3.) It is remarkable that we find in Leviticus no vestige of dualism. In treating of ceremonial impurities in matter in certain forms there is not the least hint of the Gnostic doctrine of the essential evil of matter, and hence of its eternal independence of the creative act. This error is Greek and not Semitic.
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