Leviticus 11-13

[wolfpurplemoon]

God displays a laughable lack of knowledge about the animals he created, hates new mothers and details symptoms of infectious diseases with great authority.

* Animals are declared clean or unclean using seemingly random rules and depends on things like hoof type, feeding habits and how they walk. Particularly ignorant classifications include bats being in with the birds and insects having 4 legs.

Something that grates on me is that these rules are arbitrarily declared as rules that must be followed because God said them, and the only reason for even the most random rules are just that God said them. Not very satisfying, why follow rules that have no real purpose?

* Leviticus 12 is another good solid family values chapter, giving birth makes a woman unclean for 2 weeks if the baby is a girl and just one week for a new baby boy. They have to follow purifying rituals for one or two months.

* A whole chapter on how to recognise Leprosy, seems like it would have been useful to the people at the time, identifying infectious diseases is important to protect the population. I even think that keeping the afflicted in isolation to ensure the symptoms don't worsen is commendable. However, the chapter is rather ruined by talk of declaring those infected with Leprosy unclean.

Comments

[mentalguru.livejournal.com]

I can't remember if you stated this earlier or not but apparently in the Noah's arc thing it was 7 individuals of every clean animal as well as 2 of every unclean which were put on the arc (dang, that's a lot of animal poop!).

It's kind of bizarre he'd want to save the 'unclean' though when you think about it- so why would he bother saving them to begin with if he considered them like that by defintion to be unclean?

Perhaps there's some idea of 'humans' being unclean too in general and 'unworthy' so instead we got a couple of pigs on the arc instead of say a couple of innocent kids who wouldn't have a clue what was going on otherwise...

Uuuuh.