NOTES for Num 19:1-22

In the Book of Numbers, as in the Book of Leviticus, there is a view of uncleanness that resembles a view of contagious disease: uncleanness spreads from one person to another by itself. Like an infection. More than that: uncleanness, again like an infection, can be transmitted from one person to another even through defiled objects. What is this: the naivete of ancient humanity that entered the Bible? At first glance it can look that way, especially against the background of those pre-Yahwist and pre-biblical ideas that we find in the ancient world and whose roots go back into the era before history. In those days uncleanness was viewed precisely as a kind of illness, not physical but rather metaphysical, as we would call it today: uncleanness struck a person's soul just as infection strikes the body, and a person let into himself something that was not a physical disease but at times killed no less effectively than plague or cholera did in those same ages.

Naivete? It can look that way too. Yet in reality everything is not so simple, if we remember that we are speaking about fallen humanity and pre-Christian times. Fallen humanity is infected with death. Originally, before the fall, the human being did not have to die at all. Death was known to him, but it had nothing to do with his own life. After the fall, the human being came to know death as part of his own life, as a hereditary disease with which we are all born into this fallen world. The fallen human being is inclined toward death, and the fallen world is immersed in it. After the coming of Christ, everything changed; now death is no longer all-powerful as it was before. Before, death was the fallen world's final word. Everything ended with it, and it made everyone equal.

Before Christ's coming, life in our world was not the rule but the exception, that happy exception for the human being which did not correspond to his own nature and therefore could not last long. Uncleanness was this everyday and universal manifestation of death: it gave birth to sin and was itself born of sin, but it also gave birth to sickness, every kind of decay, in general to what we today would call entropy in all its possible manifestations. Human nature after the fall corresponded more to death than to life, and it picked up death as soon as it came into contact with it. For a fallen human being, contact with death in any form was the same as entering a tuberculosis ward for a person with a weakened immune system: he had no chance of survival. This is the source of that fear of every uncleanness which can appear exaggerated to us. For a Yahwist, contact with it was equivalent to contact with death and with the impossibility of communion with God.