Moses and Obedience
“Every open container without a lid fastened on it will be unclean” (Numbers 19:15).
OBEDIENCE
Moses asked, “what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?” (Deut 4:8).
The children of Israel certainly had a head start over the other nations. They received these laws a long time before the invention of the microscope—the laws of sanitation were issued to the Israelites.
They probably wondered why all these laws were necessary, and interestingly, God showed no interest in teaching them about microorganisms, he simply told them to be obedient and consequently if they followed his laws they would escape the diseases that afflicted the Egyptians.
The Lord doesn’t always explain the inner workings of scientific processes: he leaves that for humans to find out. Man gave names to the animals, and some of those animals, the very small ones, are still being discovered and named.
God issued the laws of sanitation soon after the Israelites had escaped from Egypt. People who touched a dead or diseased animal or person—or even touched bed linen, clothes, or secretions from a sick person—were informed they needed to bathe and wash their clothes; they also needed to avoid contact with others. These instructions sound like modern health and safety rules. Houses that had mould growing were to be scraped and replastered or destroyed, to prevent the spread of disease. Porous vessels that came into contact with dead animals were to be broken, since they would harbour bacteria. People showing signs of sickness were to be quarantined, until examined and certified healthy. Tattoos and cuttings on the flesh were also forbidden. The probability of contracting an infectious disease was cut right down.
Human waste was to be buried well away from human dwellings. These days we know that epidemics of typhus, cholera, and dysentery can be attributed to the waste disposal of sewage into water supplies or nearby streets.
The Bible is not a scientific textbook, it has a deeper reach than that: God gets on with what is important for a man’s immaterial heart, leaving scientists to discover the mechanisms of the material universe.
The ancient Egyptian’s did have a little idea of how medicine worked and some of their remedies were not totally without value, though some of the treatments would not have a great deal of curative elements to them. We still have some papyruses that record Egyptian prescriptions for ailments. Prescriptions for various complaints could include dung of dog, donkey, and gazelle. Others might be dead mice, mouldy bread, lizard blood, putrid meat, stinking fat, and moisture from pigs’ ears, to name a few. So it’s all the more remarkable that Moses, who had been educated by the Egyptians, suddenly introduced the Israelites to washing, quarantine, and general sanitation.
In the Middles Ages when leprosy was a massive problem, physicians at the time said the disease was caused by practices like eating garlic or the meat of diseased hogs or a malign conjunction of the planets. A similar scenario took place for the Black Death that killed 60 million people in the 14th century, when the physicians were seen to be powerless to combat these diseases. The Church at the time (which had a lot more power than it does today), decided to follow the laws laid down for leprosy and sickness introduced by Moses. Once the condition had been diagnosed the patient was segregated from the community, and this proved to be the winning formula against the disease that was killing so many.
As we look back at the children of Israel’s time in the wilderness when they were receiving these laws we can see a lot of sense in them. But at the time all they knew was that obedience was what the Lord wanted from them.
“To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams” (1 Sam 15:22).