Leviticus15chapter 15

Leviticus 15:1-5

The chapter is spoken to Aaron as well as to Moses, which is the pattern across the clean and unclean laws at 11:1, 13:1 and 14:33, because a priest has to rule on them. The definition at verse 3 covers a flow that runs and a flow that is stopped, so the thing that makes the man unclean is the condition rather than what a bystander can see. From verse 4 the uncleanness moves outward onto his bed and his seat, and the rest of the case is about what he touches.

Leviticus 15:6-12

The ways the uncleanness passes are listed one by one: his seat, his flesh, his spittle, his saddle, carrying what lay under him, his touch, and the vessels he handles. Verse 11 sets one exemption in the middle of the list, since his touch defiles where he has not rinsed his hands in water, and the chapter gives no reason for the difference. Earthen vessels are broken and wooden ones rinsed, the same split the book makes at 6:28 and 11:33, which treats a porous pot as past cleaning and a wooden one as washable.

Leviticus 15:13-18

The stopping of the issue leaves the uncleanness standing. He counts seven days from the day it stops, bathes in running water, and on the eighth day brings two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for a sin offering and one for a burnt offering, which is the offering Leviticus 5:7 and 12:8 allow the man who cannot afford a lamb. Verses 16 to 18 dispose of the ordinary case in three verses with water and the fall of evening and no offering, and verse 18 puts a married couple under the same one day rule. Exodus 19:15 and 1 Samuel 21:4-5 both stand on this, Israel told to come not at your wives before Sinai and David's men required to be clear of it before they may eat the hallowed bread.

Leviticus 15:19-24

The woman's ordinary case is measured in days rather than in symptoms, seven of them, and it closes without an offering. Leviticus 12:2 measures the uncleanness of childbirth by these same days, so the earlier chapter is written on the assumption that a reader already has this rule. Verse 24 gives the man who lies with her seven days rather than one, and the same act returns at 18:19 as a prohibition and at 20:18 with both parties cut off from among their people.

Leviticus 15:25-30

A flow that runs past its time moves the woman from the short rule to the long one, and it lasts as long as the issue lasts. Mark 5:25 and Luke 8:43 have a woman who had lived under these verses for twelve years, spent all her living on physicians, and came up behind Jesus in a crowd. Under this chapter her touch carried her uncleanness to whatever she touched, and Mark 5:29-30 has the traffic running the other way, the fountain of her blood dried up and virtue gone out of him. Her cleansing here is the man's cleansing exactly, seven days counted and two birds on the eighth.

Leviticus 15:31

Here is the one reason the chapter gives, and it arrives after thirty verses of procedure. The danger named is the tabernacle standing in the middle of the camp, so these rules guard the place where God dwells among them. Why these particular discharges defile is left unsaid, and the commentators read the silence differently: Adam Clarke takes the rules as a guard against contagion, and Keil and Delitzsch take a discharge as the death at work in a body made to carry life. The word unclean falls twenty-seven times in the chapter and clean three times.

Leviticus 15:32-33

The closing formula names the cases again in the order the chapter took them, the man's issue, the emission of seed, the woman's period, and the man who lies with her while she is unclean, which is how 13:59 and 14:57 sign off as well. The Mishnah, compiled in the land of Israel around 200 AD, gives two whole tractates to these thirty-three verses, Zavim to the man's issue and Niddah to the woman's, and Zavim works out in detail the ways a bed passes the uncleanness on. The chapter a reader skips carries a large body of later Jewish law on its back.