Purity of Table and Purity of Life

Anyone who has signed a serious contract knows the page that few people read. It comes first, before the price and the dates and the promises, and it is headed “Definitions.” It says what “the Company” means and what “the Property” means. It is the dullest page in the document, and it governs every page that follows. If section eight says that the Company shall provide the Property, no one may decide what “Property” means by how he feels about the word today. He turns back to the definitions. A lawyer who skipped them would lose his case.

The Bible has a definitions page of its own, and one of the words most often read without it is the word “unclean.”

The common view sounds reasonable enough. When the New Testament speaks of uncleanness, many teachers say, it means sin of the heart, the bad thought and the corrupt inner life. The purity laws of Leviticus, the laws about food and bodies and touch, were outward and physical, and they do not appear in the New Testament at all. On this view, the Old Testament cared about the body, and the New Testament cares about the heart.

To test it, we must do what the lawyer does and turn back to the first page.

The Author of the Definition

We saw in Chapter 22 that when Paul told the Corinthians “do not touch what is akatharton(unclean),” he was not coining a phrase of his own. He was quoting Isaiah 52:11, words first spoken to those who bore the vessels of the LORD. The Greek akathartos ἀκάθαρτος ak-ath'-ar-tos is the word Greek-speaking Jews used to render the Hebrew tamei טָמֵא taw-may', unclean.

Who, then, defined tamei? It was not Paul, and it was not Isaiah. The Torah defined it. When we open the Torah to see how it uses the word, we find something most readers pass over: in the Torah, uncleanness grows in two branches from a single trunk.

The first branch is the uncleanness of food, body and contact. It fills Leviticus 11 through 15, which tell which animals may be eaten, what a discharge or a skin disease does, and what happens when someone touches a carcass. The second branch is the uncleanness of sexual immorality, idols and bloodshed, and it is set out in Leviticus 18.

The branches are two, but the word is one: tamei.

The Same Command Over Both

Leviticus 10:10 gave the priests their standing order, “to make a distinction between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean,” as we read in Chapter 24. One chapter later, at the close of the food laws, the same order returns in nearly the same words:

Leviticus 11:47 to make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) that may be eaten and the living thing (chai) that may not be eaten.

The verb in “to make a difference between the unclean and the clean” is badal בָּדַל baw-dawl', to divide or to separate. The priest’s great task of separating the holy from the common is carried straight to the table. What a person eats is no footnote to holiness. It is one of the places where holiness is practiced.

Now turn to the second branch, at the end of Leviticus 18, after the long list of forbidden unions:

Leviticus 18:24-25 Do not defile yourselves in any of these; for in all these the nations were defiled, which I am casting out from before you. And the land was defiled, and I visited its iniquity upon it, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.

“Do not defile yourselves,” “the nations were defiled,” and “the land was defiled” all come from the same root, tamei. The word that described a carcass in Leviticus 11 describes adultery and child sacrifice in Leviticus 18. The land itself reacts like a body that has taken in something it cannot keep, for it “vomited out its inhabitants.”

The Torah does not file these under two headings, one real and the other symbolic. It uses one word for both, because both separate a person from the holy.

Ezekiel Explains One Branch by the Other

The prophet Ezekiel shows how the two branches stand together. Listen to the way he describes Israel’s sin:

Ezekiel 36:17-18 Son of man (adam אָדָם aw-dawm'), the house of Israel were dwelling on their ground (adamah אֲדָמָה ad-aw-maw'), and they defiled it by their way and by their doings; like the uncleanness of a menstruous woman was their way before me. And I poured out my fury upon them for the blood which they shed upon the land, and for their idols with which they defiled it.

The sins Ezekiel names belong to the second branch: “the blood which they shed upon the land” and “their idols.” Yet the comparison he reaches for comes from the first branch: “like the uncleanness of a menstruous woman.” He explains moral defilement in the language of bodily defilement, and he speaks of both as the uncleanness the Torah named, neither one a mere image of the other.

When God promises to cleanse them, that promise too is written in the language of the first branch:

Ezekiel 36:25 And I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean; from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols I will cleanse you.

Water, sprinkling, and the words “you shall be clean” all belong to the rites of purification. That water cleanses them “from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols,” so the two branches are cleansed together, in a single sentence.

This, then, is the definitions page. In the Bible, “unclean” does not mean only a sin of the heart. It covers the body and the conduct together, as the Torah drew them.

The New Testament Reads from the Same Page

Go back to the New Testament with that definition in hand. A few verses before Paul quotes Isaiah, he opens the whole passage in this way:

2 Corinthians 6:14 Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have dikaiosyne δικαιοσύνη dik-ah-yos-oo'-nay(righteousness) and anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah(Torah-lessness), or what koinonia κοινωνία koy-nohn-ee'-ah(fellowship) has light with darkness?

Paul sets righteousness against anomia(Torah-lessness), and light against darkness. He is not drawing a line between a spiritual inside and a physical outside. He is drawing the line the Torah drew, and when he gathers the passage up, he names both branches:

2 Corinthians 7:1 Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh) and pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit), perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

He speaks of “all defilement of sarx(flesh) and pneuma(spirit),” of the flesh and of the spirit. If uncleanness meant only the heart, the first half of that phrase would be empty. Paul keeps both halves, as Leviticus did.

His other letters read from the same page:

Ephesians 5:3-5 But sexual immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among hagioi ἅγιοι hag'-ee-os(holy ones); and there must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this you know with certainty, that no sexually immoral or impure person or covetous man, who is an idolater, has an inheritance in the kingdom of Messiah and God.

1 Thessalonians 4:7 For God has not called us for the purpose of akatharsia ἀκαθαρσία ak-ath-ar-see'-ah(impurity), but in sanctification.

“Sexual immorality or any impurity” and “an idolater” are the concerns of Leviticus 18, the second branch. The opposite of akatharsia(impurity) is not merely an inner disposition. It is “sanctification,” being made holy, and that is the Torah’s own pairing, with the unclean set over against the holy.

What the Writers Were Doing

There is one more way to test the claim that the purity laws are absent from the New Testament, and that is to look at what the men who wrote it were doing.

In Chapter 6 we followed Paul into the temple, where he purified himself with four men under a vow at James’s request, years after the resurrection. That was not a single uneasy afternoon. When Paul later stood trial, he pointed to it in his defense:

Acts 24:18 in which they found me occupied in the temple, having been purified, without any crowd or uproar; but there were some Jews from Asia —

Acts 25:8 while Paul said in his own defense, "I have committed no offense either against the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) of the Jews or against the temple or against Caesar."

Acts 28:17 After three days Paul called together those who were the leading men of the Jews, and when they came together, he began saying to them, "Brothers, though I had done nothing against our people or the customs of our fathers, yet I was delivered as a prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans.

He said he was found “having been purified,” that he had committed “no offense either against the nomos(law) of the Jews or against the temple,” and that he had done “nothing against our people or the customs of our fathers.” These are not the words of a man who believed the purity laws had been abolished. They are the words of a man who staked his life on having kept them.

So the claim collides with the record. The New Testament does not contain the abolition of the purity laws. It contains letters that use the Torah’s own definition of uncleanness, unchanged, written by men who were still going through the Torah’s rites of purification.

The contract has not been rewritten, and its definitions page is still in force.

If that is so, a hard passage about Corinth begins to make sense. In that church people were growing sick, and some were dying, after eating the Lord’s supper.