Leviticus11chapter 11

Leviticus 11:1-8

The speech is addressed to Aaron as well as to Moses, because Leviticus 10:10-11 had just made the priest the man who puts difference between clean and unclean and teaches it to Israel. Land animals are settled by a test rather than by a list, two signs held together, a parted hoof and a chewed cud. The four creatures named in verses 4 to 7 are the near misses, each carrying one sign and lacking the other, so the rule is argued from its hardest cases. Verse 8 forbids touching the carcase as well as eating the flesh, and that is where the chapter turns from diet to contact.

Leviticus 11:9-12

Water creatures get the shortest rule in the chapter and no names at all, only fins and scales. The wording also changes here. Land beasts were called unclean, while the creatures of the water are called an abomination, four times in three verses. The chapter makes that difference in grade and gives no ground for it.

Leviticus 11:13-23

For the fowls the chapter drops the test and gives a bare list, twenty names and no criterion, so a reader learns which birds are excluded without learning what excludes them. Several of the names are argued over in translation, and the older English renderings of cuckow, swan and lapwing are read now as the gull, the water hen and the hoopoe. The Hebrew word covers winged creatures rather than a modern class, which is why the bat closes the list at verse 19. Verses 21 and 22 hold the one permission in the chapter granted out of an abominable class, four kinds of locust with legs above their feet to leap withal, and Mark 1:6 has John the Baptist living on them.

Leviticus 11:24-28

From here the subject is touching rather than eating, and what follows is a state rather than a punishment. The man is unclean until the even, and where he carried the carcase he washes his clothes, so time and water end it without a priest and without a sacrifice. Leviticus 5:2 takes up the case of a man who touches an unclean carcase and does not know it, and there guilt and an offering follow. Verse 27 extends the rule to beasts that go upon their paws, which Adam Clarke reads as the animals whose feet work like hands, apes and dogs and bears among them.

Leviticus 11:29-35

Eight small creatures are named, and then the rule moves from the animal to whatever it falls on when it is dead. A wooden vessel, a garment, a skin or a sack goes into water and is clean at evening, and an earthen vessel is broken instead. An oven or a set of ranges for pots is broken down on the same ground, so a thing fired out of clay is destroyed where a thing of wood is washed. The chapter states that difference between materials and leaves it unexplained.

Leviticus 11:36-38

Two exemptions run against the rule just given. A spring or a cistern holding a body of water stays clean when a carcase touches it, and dry seed kept for sowing stays clean, while the same seed defiles once water has been put on it. The Hebrew phrase behind plenty of water is mikveh mayim, a gathering of water, and the Mishnah tractate Mikvaot, compiled around 200 AD, takes its name and its law of immersion pools from this verse.

Leviticus 11:39-43

An animal a man may lawfully eat still defiles the one who touches it when it dies of itself, so cleanness belongs to the living beast and ends with it. From verse 41 the ground itself is closed, and everything that creeps on it is put out of the diet. Verse 42 marks out whatsoever goeth upon the belly, which repeats the words spoken over the serpent at Genesis 3:14, and the chapter draws no line between the two places.

Leviticus 11:44-45

For I am the LORD your God: Here the chapter gives its one reason, and the reason is God rather than the animals. Ye shall be holy, for I am holy, said twice in two verses, with the deliverance out of Egypt set beside it as the ground already laid. 1 Peter 1:16 quotes that line to a church keeping none of these food rules, which is the New Testament taking up the reason and leaving the list. Ye shall be holy stands again at 19:2 and 20:26, and the sentence carries the argument of the whole book.

Leviticus 11:46-47

The closing line names the purpose as making a difference between the unclean and the clean, which puts the work of separation on the table at every meal. Why the lines fall where they do has been answered by health, which Maimonides argues in the Guide for the Perplexed around 1190, by separation from the practice of the surrounding nations, by symbolic wholeness in each creature keeping to its own element, and by the order of the creation account, and Leviticus argues none of them. Mark 7:19 closes an argument about what comes out of a man with the evangelist's own comment that he purged all meats. Acts 10:9-16 gives Peter a vision of these same creatures, and Peter says at 10:28 that God had shewed him he should call no man common or unclean.