Feb. 18 Daily Question

Tell me what the function of the purity laws in Israel are. Answer the following: (1) What is purity / impurity? (2) Why does God require the maintenance of purity? (3) What is the logic of the laws we encounter related to purity, specifically the food laws?

Deriving an understanding from what I have read, one can take purity to be defined as the lack of impurity. Speaking symbolically, and in terms of definitions which are not mere restatements of the same thing that provide no clarity, it is easier to define impurity, and define it as having been tainted, especially away from an initial state. In the context that is especially relevant to theology, and to God, purity represents the state of God’s creation, and impurity is that which represents a deviation from what God’s creation symbolizes, which is good, order, and communion. God created the world out of watery chaos, through a process of making, ordering, and deeming it good. We see that impurity is therefore not only deviating from the purity that is God’s creation, but that in a harsher sense, it is a direct threat to the good of God’s creation. Considering the state of the human condition and what has been fractured by sin, and how the human person is fundamentally incomplete until communion is restored, now that our goal is that very thing, the most natural route is the pursuit of holiness through living in and embodying the purity of God’s creation. The preservation of purity is not to forbid Israel from certain behaviors so as to assert God’s dominance, but rather to keep them on the path that will lead to them entering into communion with God, something that is ultimately good for the human person, and what the human person longs for. Given the mutually exclusive relationship between impurity and purity, order must “inherently [involve] rejecting inappropriate items, ” and also involve fundamentally seeing impurity as “destructive to existing patterns” (Douglas). With this comes the logic which exists behind the food restrictions given in Leviticus which pertain to purity, though appear to have many similarities with hygiene. Much like everything else outlined in Leviticus, the food laws are to prevent impurity from what was thought to stray God’s order, evidenced by the prohibition of animals such as those who crawl, and those who dirty. As pointed out by Douglas, such animals either exist in an intermediate state of anomaly; a state where they traverse what seem to be orders of nature, and therefore go against God’s order, or are forbidden for their “habits and food” being “dirty and loathsome” (Douglas). Behind all of these laws and their understanding involves to a significant degree a consideration of their symbolic efforts at preserving purity, mainly through the prohibition of food, actions, and behaviors that lead humanity astray from the good og God’s creation and communion.