NOTES for Lev 14:33-56

It is prescribed to purify not only a person from leprosy, but also a house and the things belonging to him. At first glance this is only hygiene, but on closer inspection everything turns out not to be so simple. These purifications are part of an entire set of norms and rules of ritual purity.

They may look like a tribute to religious schemes, yet the matter is not only religious formalities. Rather, we must speak of purity as the possibility of contact with the holy. Ultimately, with that presence of God that was revealed in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. It required readiness from a person, first of all readiness to live a full life. Meanwhile, everything connected in one way or another with death deprived a person of this fullness.

In pre-Christian times, after all, death was a departure into the world of shadows, into Sheol, where there was no life. There was not life there, but existence, which could be called life only in a very conditional sense. There was no place for God there. Today we live in a different age, in the age of the approaching Kingdom, which, according to the Savior's word, "has drawn near." The completion of one's earthly path today, of course, still involves an encounter with death, but death is no longer all-powerful; now death has exactly as much power over a person as the person allows it to have over him.

The completion of one's earthly path today may well become the continuation of life, and not in a lesser fullness, but in a greater one than the fullness one had on earth. In pre-Christian times, however, it was death that reigned in the world, and the completion of one's earthly path meant entering a world of continuous dying that never came to an end. Everything connected with leprosy was the same: it was precisely dying while still alive, and it could sometimes last for decades.

Everything connected with death and dying hindered sanctification and obstructed the fullness of life that communion with God presupposed. That is why the Book of Leviticus describes the norms and rules of ritual purity so carefully: for people of the pre-Christian age this was a question of life and death, a question of communion with God or its absence. It is no wonder they feared defilement as one fears fire. Of course, it sometimes became unavoidable, but even then people tried to be cleansed of it as soon as the necessity passed; otherwise communion with God became impossible, and therefore life for a believing Yahwist lost its meaning.