Leviticus 15: Most Cases End by Evening, a Few Take Eight Days

The verse in Leviticus 15 worth the most attention is the eleventh, and it's easy to skate past because it sits in the middle of a run of verses that all end the same way: wash your clothes, bathe, "unclean until the even." Verse 11 changes one thing. Someone the man touches has to wash and bathe only if he "hath not rinsed his hands in water."

In the rest of the chapter things happen to the other person, but here the man who is unclean has something he can do, and if he does it, the person he touched is spared the bath and the wait. The chapter doesn't offer that anywhere else, and a reader hurrying toward the offering at the end won't notice it went by.

What do nine verses of beds and saddles add up to?

Verse 2 begins with a man who has "a running issue out of his flesh," and verse 3 closes the loophole in advance: whether the flesh runs or is "stopped from his issue," it is his uncleanness. After that the chapter turns to furniture for nine verses, vv4-12. His bed comes first, then anything he sits on, then a saddle he rides, then whatever was under him, then a pot he handles, with a stop in verse 8 for the case where he spits on someone clean. Each one passes the uncleanness along to whoever touches it next, and that person washes his clothes and waits for evening.

Verse 10 adds the man who carries those things out and so he washes too, and I'd have skipped the carrier entirely. Somebody had to think about who hauls the bedding out in the morning and write him into the law, and whoever it was knew that the uncleanness would end up on the person doing the work and not only on the person who caused it. That tells me these rules came from people who lived close to beds and animals and pots.

Verse 12 is the only place in the chapter where anything is destroyed:

And the vessel of earth, that he toucheth which hath the issue, shall be broken: and every vessel of wood shall be rinsed in water. (Leviticus 15:12)

Why break the clay and only rinse the wood?

Verse 12 doesn't give a reason, though I've got a guess at what a potter or a carpenter would say, from a Saturday last May. A quart of boiled linseed oil tipped off the shelf in the garage and ran down onto a pine board and onto one of Melissa's terracotta planters, the one with the basil in it. I sanded the pine back to bare wood in about twenty minutes and wiped the shelf down with mineral spirits. The planter looked fine for a week. Then a dark ring started coming up through the outside of it, and by the end of June the whole thing still smelled like a paint store when I opened the garage door. I tried baking it in the oven at low heat once while Melissa was at her Wednesday recipe afternoon, which didn't help and which I didn't mention to her. Melissa watched me carry it out to the trash can and said the basil had been doing fine in an old bucket before I came along, and that I could have just said so.

Wood can be scraped down to something clean and clay can't, so one gets a rinse and the other gets broken. Verse 12 reads like a rule written by someone who'd lost a pot that way, and I wouldn't say it's only that.

Why does the ordinary case end by evening with no offering?

The emission in verses 16-18 is one of the short cases, a bath and the evening, and the woman involved gets the same: "they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the even" (v18). A woman in her regular period is put apart seven days (v19), and then she's done. Nothing is brought to a priest.

The birds show up only after a long case, when the issue has stopped. The man counts seven days, bathes in running water (v13), and on the eighth day he brings two turtledoves or two young pigeons to the door of the tabernacle, one for a sin offering and one for a burnt offering, and the priest makes atonement "for his issue" (vv14-15). The woman does the same after the long bleeding (vv28-30). The order matches Leviticus 14, where the man is clean before the bird is ever picked up.

I wrote about what a sin offering is doing in a case like this when I covered Leviticus 12, and I still read it the same way. It has to do with the tabernacle, and the last verse of this chapter points the same direction when it speaks of defiling "my tabernacle that is among them" (v31). Chapter 15 is a cleaner example than chapter 12, since nobody in it has done anything wrong and the birds come anyway.

Looking at it again, what stands out to me is how little the ordinary cases ask of anybody, a bath and a washed shirt and a wait until dark, while the one offering is kept for a person who has been unwell for days and is now well. It comes after the recovery and not before. Most of the law in this chapter is built around a household's worst weeks, and nearly all of it is about getting them to end.

What does Mark 5 do with the woman's twelve years?

Mark tells of a woman who "had an issue of blood twelve years" (Mark 5:25). That puts her in the long case of Leviticus 15:25-27, where her beds and seats are unclean and so is whoever touches them. She comes up behind Jesus in a crowd and touches his garment (Mark 5:27). Leviticus doesn't say a garment she touches becomes unclean, but verse 27 does say that whoever touches the things she's sat on is, and I'd expect the crowd to have worked it out the same way.

Mark's account runs in the other direction. She felt in her body that she was healed (v29), Jesus turned and asked who touched him, and she came trembling and "told him all the truth" (v33). He answers:

Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague. (Mark 5:34)

Mark doesn't say whether she took two birds to a priest afterward. What Mark does record is a woman with twelve years of practice at not touching people, reaching out from behind anyway, and Jesus stopping a whole crowd to find her.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "unclean until the even" mean?

Until evening, and the person who touched the bed or the seat was expected to wash and then wait it out. Verse 5 is the first place it shows up and verse 27 is the last, and nothing more is asked in between.

Do Latter-day Saints keep these rules?

No. The law of Moses is understood to have been fulfilled in Christ and the purity laws went with it. I read the chapter the way I'd read an old building code from my own town, as a record of what the people living there were trying to protect.

Is verse 11 really about rinsing first?

That's how I read it, and it's an inference. The verse makes the washing depend on whether he rinsed his hands, and I can't see another reason to put the clause there.

How long does a long case last?

For the woman, verse 25 says "many days" beyond her ordinary time. For the man the chapter gives no count, only that it ends when he's cleansed of his issue and counts seven days.

I'm still stuck on verse 8, a man with the issue spitting on someone who's clean. It's one line and it gets the full wash-and-wait treatment, and nothing around it explains why spit made the list. If you've seen a reason for it somewhere, I'd like to hear it.

— D.