Lev 13.1-2: Then the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling or a scab or a bright spot, and it becomes an infection of leprosy on the skin of his body, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. - NASB Myth-busting time. Ive recently been reading Bro Jonathan Burkes well researched book, Living on the Edge. Ive found to my great relief that I can forget the haunting depictions of leprosy that I saw years ago in the movie Ben Hur (those scenes were terrifying!). Why? Because Lev 13 apparently is not talking about the condition described many years ago by one of my brothers[2] as skin-come-off, AKA Hansens Disease. Phew. Jono writes[1] (and Ive lifted the footnotes straight out of the book too): In his work The Law of Moses, brother Roberts assumes that the disease in Leviticus 13 refers specifically to the condition known as Hansens disease, known colloquially as leprosy. This has been the traditional interpretation of this chapter, and other passages in which the same Hebrew word is used. Roberts used this conclusion as the basis of various doctrinal and spiritual teachings on the subjects of sin and death, the atonement, and fellowship, and numerous articles in the Christadelphian magazine followed this approach throughout the 20th century. Unfortunately, all such interpretations of this Hebrew word are completely unfounded. The simple fact is that leprosy did not exist in the time of Moses; it did not exist in the Middle East until it was brought there from Europe, most likely by the Greeks during the conquests of Alexander the Great. This is not a recent discovery. As early as 1899, Jay F. Schamberg (a doctor), presented convincing lexical, historical, and medical evidence that Hansens disease was not referred to in Leviticus and was unknown to the Jews at the time; [55] he recommended that translators of the Bible ought not to use the term lepra or leprosy in translating tsaraath. [56] By 1914 this conclusion was now so generally admitted as to require no further discussion, [57] and it was widely recognized that there is no proof that the disease was known in Palestine in early days any more than in Egypt or in other parts of the near Orient. Accordingly, the error of the traditional rendering is corrected in certain modern Bible translations, and the majority of standard Bible commentaries. [58] Inter-textual evidence supports the conclusion; the description of the skin disease in Leviticus 13 does not match that of Hansens disease (the symptoms are different, and the condition resolves without medication), and Naaman in 2 Kings 5 could not have been a successful general if he had actually suffered from leprosy. A hundred years of Christadelphian commentaries have been written in fruitless exposition of spiritual lessons from leprosy in the Law of Moses, when the passage in question made no reference to it and despite the fact that mainstream scholarship had disproved the idea shortly after brother Roberts wrote The Law of Moses. The importance of understanding socio-historical context could hardly be emphasized more strongly. Reproduced by kind permission. [1] Burke, Living on the Edge (2014), pp 31-32 [2] The name of the guilty party will be protected ;) Footnotes from the relevant section of Living on the Edge: [55] there is no evidence in the Levitical description to warrant the belief that leprosy, in the modern sense of the word, existed among the Jews at that period, Jay F. Schamberg, The Nature of the Leprosy of the Bible From a Medical and Biblical Point of View, The Biblical World, Vol. 13, No. 3, (March, 1899), 169. [56] Ibid., p. 169. [57] Morris Jastrow, The So-Called Leprosy Laws: An Analysis of Leviticus, Chapters 13 and 14, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, volume 4, no. 3 (Jan. 1914), 404. [58] Examples include: Hartley, Leviticus, Word Biblical Commentary, volume 4, p. 187 (2002); Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary, p. 75 (1989); Woods & Rogers, Leviticus-Numbers, College Press NIV Commentary, p. 91 (2006); Milgrom, Leviticus: a book of ritual and ethics, Continental Commentary Series, p. 127 (2004); Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, New International Commentary on the Old Testament, p. 192 (1979).
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 06:30:00 +0000
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