Sunday Sermonette: Icky stuff

Leviticus 15 is another one of those chapters that fundamentalists pretend doesn ' t exist. We get that the priestly rituals detailed in Leviticus ended with the destruction of the second temple. Rather odd, if they were so important to God, that he lost interest at that point. (We ' ll get to more on that next week.) But at least it ' s proffered as an explanation. Nothing happened to cancel this out, however. The part at the end about menstruation orthodox Jews still pay partial attention to.15 TheLord said to Moses and Aaron,2 “Say to the people of Israel, When any man has a discharge from his body, his discharge is unclean.3 And this is the law of his uncleanness for a discharge: whether his body runs with his discharge, or his body is stopped from discharge, it is uncleanness in him.4 Commentators universally agree that this is circumspect language that actually means to refer specifically to discharge from the male member, not just any old suppurating or  pustulent lesion. As far as I know (I ' m not a medical doctor) this is probably gonorrhea. Now, for those who try to justify this as hygienic, for the most part it is not. To get gonorrhea you really need to have sex with the guy, although if you did get the discharge on your hands and touch your eye you could get it that way. Otherwise none of this is necessary. And you can be infected, and either asymptomatic or have symptoms other than discharge, and still spread it by sexual contact. So ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs