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If you think issues of uncleanness are limited to the ancient world, consider this cover story headline last year from an issue of U.S. News & World Report: “The Future of Water: Costly • Dirty • Scarce.”
The article began with an account of dirty water in Atlanta, where in some neighborhoods it had been flowing brown from the tap. From time to time, “boil water” advisories had been issued to let residents know the water was not safe to drink. The situation may grow worse as 700,000 miles of aging pipes and mains throughout America decay and reach the end of their life spans. One federal official called clean water “the biggest environmental issue that we face in the 21st century.”
Such health concerns help bring the world of Leviticus closer to home. For example, our readings for today and tomorrow deal with the problems of infectious skin diseases and mildew.
Some Bibles translate infectious skin disease as leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, as it is called today. But the Hebrew word used here is a general term, and the symptoms don’t seem to fit leprosy. The word for mildew is similarly a general term, and can also refer to mold or fungus. These two health or hygiene issues may be paired here because they were seen as parallel problems–one affecting living things, one affecting inanimate objects.
The Law prescribed several practical responses to these problems, including careful diagnosis, various forms of quarantine, and thorough washing. Why were the priests responsible for this? Perhaps because diseases and such, while not sin, were still consequences of the Fall and thus results of sin. Additionally, the priests were the community’s guardians of purity, no matter what kind of purity was involved.
TODAY ALONG THE WAY
Today, we are going to leave this application portion of the devotional open for the Holy Spirit to direct you. We recommend that you pray for a specific application for yourself based on the principle of purity, modernized for today, and personalized for you. To begin, you might review “Today Along the Way” for the past two days, both of which dealt with the question of purity.
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