NOTES for Lev 13:1-28

Illness and uncleanness, illness and sin, the connection between them: this is an old and disputed subject. Not so very long ago (by historical standards, of course), leprosy was considered not merely a contagious disease, but also an unclean and defiling one. People appealed precisely to the Book of Leviticus, because everything there is unambiguous. Meanwhile, both then and especially today, a natural question arises: why leprosy in particular?

Yes, leprosy is a contagious disease, but there are others no less dangerous: plague, for example, or smallpox, or cholera, or anthrax. All these diseases were known in antiquity, but for some reason it is leprosy that is especially singled out in the Book of Leviticus. If the problem is reduced only to medicine, to hygiene, to anti-epidemic measures, the question remains unanswered. What, then?

Cholera is a deadly disease, like plague and anthrax. They all kill a person, sometimes painfully, but always comparatively quickly. Often even today, if appropriate medical help is lacking. Death itself, however, in antiquity was not such a problem, as frightening as this may sound to the ear of our contemporary. In antiquity (and in the Middle Ages too) no one "revered life." People simply lived as God gave them to live. In their hour they rejoiced, in their hour they suffered, in their hour they were born, in their hour they died.

The one who wanted to get out of this circle searched for his own path; sometimes he found it, sometimes he did not. Emotions about the brevity of life, or the nearness of death, or anything else of that kind were considered excessive. People rejoiced in concrete joys, grieved concrete griefs, suffered from concrete sufferings, everything in its own time. What was considered truly terrible and senseless was not death, but life in dying.

So leprosy became a symbol precisely of something like that: life in dying. Roughly as cancer has become for us today, especially when it drags on long and painfully and does not end, though cancer was a great rarity in antiquity. Leprosy, however, was far more common than it is in our world today, and it was incurable. A person lived while dying, sometimes for decades, and the question involuntarily arose: why? To answer the question of human sinfulness in such a case is practically impossible, at least for a human being, but to state the fact of uncleanness is quite possible. And this was done, simply on the basis of fact. As everything was in those times.