In | Life, Death and the Logic of Defilement

Israelite views of defilement or impurity were really about God’s holiness. The standard for defilement, like the standard for moral purity, is based in the statement found in Leviticus 19:2: “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.”

The moral code that we’re going to encounter throughout the Bible is in many ways a description of God’s own character. The more the Israelites adopt the way of holiness, the more they reflect the character of YHWH. The purity codes on defilement and impurity have a different dimension. Defilements such as scale disease and menstruation may appear to be random conditions, but they are classified in the same category. They all represent death to ancient Near Eastern sensibilities. 

Throughout the Bible, God is morally holy, but He is also identified with life. Finding God is finding life, and the people of Israel are “children of the living God” (Hosea 1:10). Simply put, YHWH is the Lord of life. Interestingly, the most common oath in the Bible is swearing by the life of God. And even more remarkably, God swears by His own life 17 times. For example, in Numbers 14:28-29, God directs Moses to reprimand the grumbling Israelites: “So tell them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Lord, I will do to you the very thing I heard you say: In this wilderness your bodies will fall.”

The Bible’s ongoing critique of pagan worship is that their gods are not alive. People worship things that they create (see image of an ancient household idol above) rather than the God who creates everything (1 Kings 18:26; Is 42:19-21, 44:12-21; Ps 115:5-7).

Death is the opposite of the life-giving God and all that He makes holy. Death is the ultimate uncleanness. The Mishnah, a collection of ancient Jewish interpretation traditions, refers to death as “the father of fathers of defilement.” This implies that all other defilement can be traced to a connection with death. 

As Dr. Jacob Milgrom puts it, “The bodily impurities focus on four phenomena: (dead bodies), semen, blood and scale disease. Their common denominator is death or the appearance of death.”

The relationship of a corpse to death is obvious enough, but what about the others?

What does scale disease have to do with death? What sets it apart from any other disease? It has the physical appearance of decomposition. When Moses and Aaron’s sister is stricken by scale disease, Aaron prays, “Do not let her be like a stillborn infant coming from its mother’s womb with its flesh half eaten away” (Num 12:12, NIV). This disease represented death in life, the decay of the body before its time. 

Fair enough, but what about semen and menstrual blood? Don’t they represent life?

Semen and menstrual blood do represent life, and that’s why the loss of these fluids through menstruations and seminal emissions both represent a loss of life. 

The fact that feces and urine are not defiling in Israel proves the same point. Both of these waste products were considered unclean by Israel’s contemporaries but did not have that status in Israel. Why? They are associated with life. Bodily waste is a necessary part of life. 

Altogether, the pattern is unmistakable. YHWH is the living God and Israel’s source of life. Death is as foreign to Him as immorality. And like immorality in the New Testament, God’s relationship with death is about to change. Stay tuned.

Sources: Emanuel Feldman, Biblical and Post-biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology, 1977, pp. 15, 24-26; M. J. H. M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz, eds., Purity and Holiness, 2000, p. 32.