Clean and Unclean Reach the Table and the Household

Aaron is addressed alongside Moses. In 10:8 the LORD spoke to Aaron alone about wine and duty, and the charge there was to teach Israel the difference between clean and unclean. The food laws that follow are the first body of that teaching, so the priest who must teach it hears it first.

The law opens with permission, not prohibition: these are the animals ye shall eat. Two Hebrew words sit side by side, chayyah for living creatures in general and behemah for the larger four-footed beasts, so the sentence moves from the wide category to the herd animals Israel actually kept.

Three marks, not two. The hoof must part, the split must run right through (the Hebrew doubles the word, cleaving a cleft), and the animal must bring up its cud. Cattle, sheep and goats pass easily; Deuteronomy 14:4–5 later names ten permitted kinds, deer and wild goats among them.

The camel was the caravan animal of Abraham’s servant (Genesis 24:10) and of every trader crossing the desert. Its foot is split into two toes above but rests on one broad padded sole, which is why an observer could say it chews the cud yet does not truly divide the hoof.

The Hebrew shaphan is almost certainly the rock hyrax, a rabbit-sized animal of cliffs and boulders. Psalm 104:18 gives the rocks as its refuge and Proverbs 30:26 calls it a feeble folk. It does not ruminate, but its jaw works constantly from side to side, and the law classifies by what an Israelite would see.

The hare, arnebeth, appears only here and in Deuteronomy 14:7. Hares pass soft pellets and eat them again, taking a second pass at the same food, which is close enough to bringing up the cud for a classification made by watching animals rather than dissecting them.

The pig fails the other way, and the sentence turns on its word order: though he divide the hoof, yet he cheweth not. Isaiah 65:4 and 66:17 make eating swine a mark of rebellion, and centuries later 2 Maccabees 6–7 records Jews dying rather than eat it under compulsion.

The ban covers eating and touching the carcase, not handling the living animal. Israel rode the ass and the camel, both unclean for food, and no rule here forbids that. It is the dead body of an unclean kind that carries the impurity.

Both fins and scales are required. The word for scales, qasqeseth, is the word used for the plates of Goliath’s armour in 1 Samuel 17:5, where his coat of mail is literally a coat of scales. Eels, catfish, shellfish and every creature without that armour are excluded.

The word rendered abomination here is sheqets, used almost entirely for forbidden creatures, and different from the to‘evah of chapters 18 and 20. The phrase any living thing in the waters echoes Genesis 1:20–21, where the waters first swarm with living creatures.

The line says it again and adds something: the carcases of these water creatures are to be held in abomination. The verb means to regard with loathing, an instruction about attitude as much as action, and the repetition builds a wall of three statements across verses 10 to 12.

The third and shortest form of the water rule strips it to its test: no fins nor scales, abomination. After a long sentence and an emphatic one, the plain restatement reads like a closing ruling that a priest could recite from memory.

The birds come with no test at all, only names, about twenty kinds in all. The eagle, nesher, is often the griffon vulture; Micah 1:16 speaks of its baldness. Ossifrage is Latin for bone-breaker, the bearded vulture that drops bones on rocks to split them. The list opens with the great carrion birds.

After his kind appears here for the first time in the bird list, borrowing the language of Genesis 1. The first name is da’ah; the parallel list in Deuteronomy 14:13 reads ra’ah, a difference of one Hebrew letter, since daleth and resh look almost identical on the page.

Every raven after his kind takes in the whole crow family. The raven was the first creature sent out of the ark (Genesis 8:7), and in 1 Kings 17:6 ravens carry bread and flesh to Elijah morning and evening: a bird Israel could not eat, bringing a prophet his food.

The owl here is bath haya‘anah, literally daughter of the waste or of greed, which most modern scholars take as the ostrich. The night hawk, tachmas, and the cuckow, shachaph, are uncertain; shachaph may be a gull. The King James names are informed guesses at birds long unidentifiable.

The little owl is kos, spelled like the ordinary word for a cup; Psalm 102:6 has the same bird among the ruins, an owl of the desert. The cormorant, shalak, is named from a verb for casting down, a fitting word for a bird that plunges into water after fish.

The swan, tinshemeth, turns up again in verse 30 translated mole, so the one Hebrew name covers two creatures; here it is probably an owl. The gier eagle, racham, shares its root with the word for womb and tender mercy, and is usually identified as the Egyptian vulture.

The stork, chasidah, is named from chesed, loyal kindness, perhaps for its care of its young. Jeremiah 8:7 says she knows her appointed times. The lapwing, dukiphath, is the crested hoopoe. Last comes the bat, a flying mammal, which shows the list is of flying things, not of birds in the modern sense.

Fowls that creep are winged swarming creatures, what we call insects. Going upon all four describes how they look walking on a surface, not a count of legs; an insect standing with its long rear pair raised seems to move on four. The category is again built from what the eye sees.

Legs above their feet are the long jointed hind legs of the locust family, which fold above the walking feet and fling the insect into the air. Withal, in 1611 English, simply means with them: legs to leap with upon the earth.

Four leaping kinds are allowed. Arbeh is the locust of the eighth plague (Exodus 10:4). The beetle, chargol, is a cricket or locust, since no beetle leaps, and chagab is the grasshopper of the spies’ report in Numbers 13:33. John the Baptist lived on locusts and wild honey (Mark 1:6).

The exception closes as quickly as it opened. Everything else with wings that walks on the ground is abomination, so the allowance of verses 21 and 22 is kept within its four named kinds rather than widening to any insect that happens to hop.

The subject changes from diet to contact. Until the even gives the uncleanness a fixed end, and since Israel’s day turns at sunset, the person is clean with the new day. No offering is required for this degree of impurity: washing and waiting are enough.

Carrying a carcass is fuller contact than touching one, so it adds washing the clothes. Someone in every household had to take a dead animal out of the house or field, and the law assumes the chore will be done and supplies the way back to cleanness.

The King James wording is tangled. The sense is a beast whose hoof is not fully split: the solid hoof of the horse and ass, or the camel’s partly divided foot. These were Israel’s working animals, and their carcasses were the ones a farmer would most often have to handle.

Paws is kappayim, the plural of kaph, the word for the palm of a hand or the sole of a foot. It covers every animal that walks on soft pads: dog, cat, fox, jackal, bear and lion. The dogs that scavenged a town’s streets fall here.

The carrying rule of verse 25 is applied again to the pad-footed beasts, and the paragraph ends with its refrain, they are unclean unto you. Two classes of land animal are now covered, the hooved and the pawed, and each has its own touching and carrying rule.

A second list begins, eight small creatures that swarm on the ground. The weasel may be the mole rat; the mouse, akbar, is the creature whose golden images the Philistines sent back with the ark (1 Samuel 6:4). The tortoise, tsab, is probably a large spiny-tailed lizard.

Most of these names are small reptiles. The ferret is anaqah, perhaps the gecko, whose cry sounds like a groan; the chameleon, koach, may be the land monitor; the snail, chomet, is probably a skink or sand lizard; and the mole is the tinshemeth that verse 18 called a swan.

These eight are singled out because they are the creatures most likely to die inside a house: under a jar, in a store room, on a bed. Their dead bodies carry the same until-evening uncleanness as the larger beasts, and the verses that follow follow them into the household.

Four kinds of article are named: wood, cloth, leather and sack, the rough goat-hair fabric of grain bags and mourning dress. Wherein any work is done means things in daily use. Each is plunged into water and waits out the day, so the utensil is kept, not thrown away.

Unglazed clay soaks up whatever touches it and cannot be scrubbed clean, so an earthen pot must be broken. The same rule governs the pot of the sin offering in 6:28, where clay is broken but bronze is scoured. The potsherds that litter every excavated Israelite town fit a people who broke vessels this readily.

Moisture is the carrier. Food that such water has reached becomes unclean, and any drink standing in the contaminated vessel shares its state. Dry food is not mentioned, and the silence prepares the distinction the chapter draws explicitly at verses 37 and 38.

The oven, tannur, was a clay cylinder heated from inside, and the ranges for pots, kirayim, a double hearth that appears nowhere else in the Bible. Both are fired clay fixed in place, so the logic of the earthen pot in verse 33 applies: they are broken down and rebuilt.

Plenty of water translates miqveh mayim, a gathering of waters, the phrase used of the seas in Genesis 1:10. A spring or a cistern is not rendered unclean by a dead mouse. Later Judaism named its immersion pool the miqveh from this verse. The one who lifts the carcass out is still unclean.

Seed set aside for sowing stays clean when a dead creature falls on it. That protects next year’s harvest: a family would not lose its planting stock over a lizard in the store jar.

Wet the seed and the answer changes. Water makes it susceptible, as in verse 34. The rabbis built a whole tractate of the Mishnah, Makhshirin, meaning things that make susceptible, on these two verses and the question of when liquid has touched produce.

A dead animal of a permitted kind is the case now. The Hebrew nevelah means a carcass that has died of itself rather than been slaughtered, and touching it defiles until evening. Being a clean species does not make a dead body clean.

Eating such a carcass is treated as something that happens, with washing and waiting as the remedy. Deuteronomy 14:21 forbids Israel to eat it and says to give it to the stranger, and 22:8 forbids it to priests outright. Leviticus supplies what the ordinary Israelite does afterwards.

Creeping thing that creepeth renders sherets hashorets, the noun and the verb from one root, to swarm. It is the same verb of Genesis 1:20, where the waters bring forth abundantly. What swarms on the ground, beyond the eight of verses 29 and 30, is not food.

Goeth upon the belly uses gachon, the word of Genesis 3:14, where the serpent is sentenced to go upon its belly. Scribes counted the letters of the Torah and marked the vav of gachon as its midpoint, printed large in Hebrew Bibles to this day. More feet covers centipedes and their kin.

Make yourselves abominable is literally make your souls detestable. The concern shifts from the creature to the person who eats it: the one who takes in what is sheqets becomes marked by it. Unclean and defiled are stacked in one sentence so the point cannot be missed.

The first time Leviticus says ye shall be holy; for I am holy. The refrain returns at 19:2, 20:7 and 20:26, and 1 Peter 1:16 quotes it. It comes first in a chapter about lizards and locusts, not in a chapter about the sanctuary.

The verb is bringeth up, a participle of ascent, where elsewhere Leviticus usually says brought you forth. It pictures a journey going upward toward the land. To be your God is the purpose clause of the Exodus itself, as in Exodus 6:7, and the call to holiness follows from it.

This is the law of is the formula that closes each set of instructions in these chapters (7:37, 12:7, 13:59, 14:57, 15:32). Torah here has its working sense of priestly instruction. The summary names the four realms in order: land, air, water, and ground.

To make a difference is lehavdil, the verb of Genesis 1:4, where God divided the light from the darkness. The separations of creation become Israel’s daily task at table. Leviticus 20:25 returns to this exact duty and ties it to Israel’s own separation from the nations.