Sunday Sermonette: A plague upon your house!

Today's excerpt is fairly short, which gives me an opportunity to say something about the origin of the Tanakh, and particularly the Torah/Pentateuch. The Torah is thought to have first been compiled around 600 BC, or perhaps considerably later. However, no documents anywhere near that old have survived. The text which is the basis of all modern Torahs and Christian Bibles is the so-called Masoretic text, which dates to around 600 AD but the oldest extant copies were made in the 9th Century. A somewhat older source is a Greek translation called the Septuagint, which differs in some mostly minor ways. The so-called Dead Sea scrolls, dating from around 200 BC to 100 AD, contain fragments of the Tanakh. These also differ in some respects from the Masoretic text, from which we can conclude that there were somewhat different versions in existence.

There was once a scholarly consensus that Genesis, Exodus and the Book of Numbers are a composite of two documents, called J or the Jhawist or Yahwist, who called God Yahweh; and E, the Elohist, who called God Elohim. However, as we can tell from the innumerable contradictions, multiple versions of the same story, and jarring interpolations, J was itself cobbled together from multiple sources and the existence of a separate, unified E text cannot be inferred.

Deuteronomy is ascribed to a separate source, which is also believed to be the source of the succeeding historical texts in the Tanakh.

Leviticus is ascribed to the so-called Priestly sources, or P. That seems pretty obvious. It is a manual of the responsibilities and powers of priests. It is framed in the context of the Exodus story to give it mythical authority, but it was written, as I have noted many times, 2,000 years after the events it purports to describe. Most scholars believe that the Hebrews did not universally or even generally observe the laws and practices prescribed in Leviticus at the time it was written. In particular, the northern Kingdom of  Israel was not theocratic and even allowed the worship of Canaanite gods.

So the purpose of the Torah, and Leviticus in particular, was proselytization. Indeed the other four books of the Torah were redacted by priests. The intent was to unify the Israelites under the priestly orthodoxy described in Leviticus. Obviously they succeeded, at least to the extent that the Israelites became defined by the religion of Judaism. It is possible, of course, that some people did not adopt the religious orthodoxy and so ceased to be Israelites or Jews. But the Torah became the essential core of Jewish identity. This was not true from the beginning, however, it happened after the Babylonian exile. Everything before that is fiction.

Now for today's reading, which is so bizarre as to need little comment. I will note that it had to be phrased in the future tense, since the people at the time the law was given were supposedly living in tents. While this could conceivably describe mold or mildew, that seems improbable in drafty stone houses in an arid climate with no indoor plumbing.

³³ The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ³⁴ “When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you for a possession, and I put a leprous disease in a house in the land of your possession, ³⁵ then he who owns the house shall come and tell the priest, ‘There seems to me to be some sort of disease in my house.’ ³⁶ Then the priest shall command that they empty the house before the priest goes to examine the disease, lest all that is in the house be declared unclean; and afterward the priest shall go in to see the house. ³⁷ And he shall examine the disease; and if the disease is in the walls of the house with greenish or reddish spots, and if it appears to be deeper than the surface, ³⁸ then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house, and shut up the house seven days. ³⁹ And the priest shall come again on the seventh day, and look; and if the disease has spread in the walls of the house, ⁴⁰ then the priest shall command that they take out the stones in which is the disease and throw them into an unclean place outside the city; ⁴¹ and he shall cause the inside of the house to be scraped round about, and the plaster that they scrape off they shall pour into an unclean place outside the city; ⁴² then they shall take other stones and put them in the place of those stones, and he shall take other plaster and plaster the house.
⁴³ “If the disease breaks out again in the house, after he has taken out the stones and scraped the house and plastered it, ⁴⁴ then the priest shall go and look; and if the disease has spread in the house, it is a malignant leprosy in the house; it is unclean. ⁴⁵ And he shall break down the house, its stones and timber and all the plaster of the house; and he shall carry them forth out of the city to an unclean place. ⁴⁶ Moreover he who enters the house while it is shut up shall be unclean until the evening; ⁴⁷ and he who lies down in the house shall wash his clothes; and he who eats in the house shall wash his clothes.
⁴⁸ “But if the priest comes and makes an examination, and the disease has not spread in the house after the house was plastered, then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, for the disease is healed. ⁴⁹ And for the cleansing of the house he shall take two small birds, with cedarwood and scarlet stuff and hyssop, ⁵⁰ and shall kill one of the birds in an earthen vessel over running water, ⁵¹ and shall take the cedarwood and the hyssop and the scarlet stuff, along with the living bird, and dip them in the blood of the bird that was killed and in the running water, and sprinkle the house seven times. ⁵² Thus he shall cleanse the house with the blood of the bird, and with the running water, and with the living bird, and with the cedarwood and hyssop and scarlet stuff; ⁵³ and he shall let the living bird go out of the city into the open field; so he shall make atonement for the house, and it shall be clean.”
⁵⁴ This is the law for any leprous disease: for an itch, ⁵⁵ for leprosy in a garment or in a house, ⁵⁶ and for a swelling or an eruption or a spot, ⁵⁷ to show when it is unclean and when it is clean. This is the law for leprosy.