Clean and Unclean Before Sinai - Episode 175

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and last week I was talking about the animals in the ark, and I promised that I would get a lot more into the clean unclean question here. So that's what we're gonna do today. [00:00:29] I'm pretty much just gonna dive right into some of the issues and some of the things we're gonna be talking about. But first I do want to mention that this is complicated on a number of levels. It's complicated because of what we see directly in Genesis. It's complicated by what we see elsewhere in the Pentateuch. And it's complicated by the fact that we have clean and unclean animals, but we also have the context of clean and unclean in the purity laws within Leviticus and other places. [00:01:04] And so part of the question really has to be how the clean and unclean animals fit within that matrix, or do they? [00:01:14] There's a whole lot of things that get complicated simply for the fact that we really haven't fully and completely unpacked the idea of clean and unclean as far as purity. And to be quite honest with you, I don't really think it's possible to entirely do that. And the reason I say that is because, for us today on this side of history and the way that we are thinking about things, we tend to look at things in a very high analytical way. And I'm just not really sure that that's exactly what we should be doing with the text in general. [00:01:55] Now, I think that we can't avoid it, so I'm not gonna say we shouldn't do it. I'm not gonna say that this is a bad thing. It is just the way that our context and our culture does things. So it's unavoidable. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it because this is the world we live in and these are the things we have to deal with, and it's just the way we think. And you cannot get away from the way that you think. [00:02:19] I'm not saying it's bad, but I am saying we need to take a step back and say that the way that we are analyzing things does not have to correspond to the way that the ancient person actually thought and actually experienced the world because the way that we're doing it is simply very, very different. This is why the context of narrative is so essential for us to reclaim and to take hold of in our Bible study and the way that we're thinking. [00:02:53] It's also very important to take seriously the fact that these ancient people were real people and we should try to understand them within their own context. It's the same as if we have family members or friends or coworkers or anybody else around us where, to really adequately have a good relationship with them, and to understand them, we have to try to get into their heads and understand things from their perspective. If we are only, or mainly, looking at things from within ourselves, it's problematic. [00:03:33] And so if we're insisting that things have to fit within our frameworks, it's problematic. It's problematic in a relationship. It's problematic when we're dealing with other people. It's problematic when we're dealing with ancient texts. And the text is important. It is the revelation we have from God. But it's important to understand the past as being full of real people with real experiences who simply did not think like we do. And just because we're talking about the Old Testament doesn't make these people any less the people of God, simply because they are not in the context of the Christian Church and the fellowship we have within the Christian Church. [00:04:17] So I just wanna kind of put some of that out there for you to think about in regards to these things. Because the more analytical we get about things, the more we try to fit them into really specific and concrete categories, the more we're probably drifting away from that ancient way of thinking. And I'm not saying that the categories don't exist. I'm not saying that there aren't distinctions to be made because I think that's gonna be very clear that that's actually part and parcel of what the narrative is telling us. [00:04:51] There are distinctions and there are differences, and those matter. But the way that we're experiencing them in an analytical culture and the way that you might experience them in a culture that is more grounded in practical questions and things like that, I think those are gonna be a little bit different. I want to acknowledge the difference, and we're trying to reclaim at least some of it. It is not possible to reclaim all of it. We're not picking up that context and plopping it down for us, but we are trying to take it seriously and trying to see it in a different light. [00:05:28] And I think that exercise in itself is so, so helpful to us. It's helpful to our reading. It's helpful to our empathy and understanding of other people. And it's really essential to see that the way God is working in salvation history really deals with people as they are. Which is why I don't think we should necessarily have to remove our context from ourselves and pretend like it's not a thing or that there's something wrong with it. [00:05:59] I think God is okay with where we are and it's not really a problem, but when we have the ability to look at things through different lenses, we should avail ourselves of that opportunity. It is a particular tool that is going to help us see things in a way that we wouldn't otherwise. It doesn't mean that not having that tool doesn't allow us to see revelation or the work of God, but again, we should avail ourselves of all of the tools that we have. [00:06:31] Okay, so today we're gonna talk about what does clean and unclean mean here in the flood narrative before Sinai. What kind of distinction is this in the world of Genesis seven? We're gonna have two different directions in this episode. The first one is the ancient Near Eastern sacrificial ritual hierarchy. And then the second lane is one of the biblical theological development of that into Israel's holiness system. [00:07:06] Let me say that again because that might seem like a lot of stuff we're dealing with here, but what we have broadly is an ancient Near Eastern ritual system. This just is the world they live in. But biblically speaking, they're taking that and the historical development of the people of Israel is that they fit all of that into their understanding of who God is. And the whole thing is meant to teach something about who God is and who the people are in relation to God. That's the purpose of revelation in general. What we're looking at here is a piece of that, and it's going to teach us something when we understand it in this way. [00:07:48] In our last episode when we were contrasting Genesis six and Genesis seven and the animals and the repetition, we looked at broad preservation language and how we had the introduction of But then we're acknowledging also that Genesis eight jumps into using clean animals and birds in sacrifice. [00:08:11] Our primary passages today are gonna be centered in Genesis seven, two, and three. So let me go ahead and read that. Reading in the ESV, it says, quote, " Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate, and seven pairs of the birds of the heavens, also male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth." End quote. [00:08:43] And then I also want to quote Genesis eight, verse 20, which says, quote, " Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar." End quote. [00:09:00] Okay, so we have these passages foregrounding our conversation here today. Clean and unclean has some sort of meaning to Noah, and he sees that this is tied to the sacrificial offerings he's going to give God. [00:09:16] So here's our question. Is it only about sacrifice? Is the clean and unclean distinction mainly or only about sacrifice for Noah? Or should we see the clean and unclean distinction to be mainly about food like we see in Leviticus 11, for instance? Another question we could ask is if it's about a broader issue of status and suitability. That's going to be the bulk of our conversation today, but we will be treating each of these things. [00:09:50] Now, our supporting verses in the Torah in general is of course Leviticus 11. The whole chapter is about the food and the animals that are available to eat and the animals that are not. And these are called clean and unclean animals. So clearly for the Israelite, practical day-to-day life when they're talking about clean animals, it really does have something to do with their diet . [00:10:18] But I'm gonna throw in Leviticus 17, verse 15. And this says, quote, "And every person who eats what dies of itself or what is torn by beasts, whether he is a native or a sojourner, shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening, then he shall be clean." End quote. [00:10:43] Now, this does not mention clean or unclean animals, but it says that anybody who eats like roadkill, for instance, something along the road where it has just already died or it's been killed by beasts and there's still a carcass there that could be eaten. If somebody eats that, then they are unclean. The person themselves who eats the animal that is just dead by itself is unclean. [00:11:14] This mentions, again, nothing to do with clean or unclean animals here, but probably the context is that there is still blood in the carcass. The blood has not been drained properly, and so that has created a situation where the person is unclean. And they have to bathe and they have to wait until the evening and then the person who ate it is going to be clean. [00:11:38] Now, I'm pointing this out because there is no express passage that says that a person eating an unclean animal themselves becomes unclean. [00:11:51] Now there is something close to that. We do have in Leviticus 20, verses 25 through 26. Quote, " You shall therefore separate the clean beast from the unclean and the unclean bird from the clean. You shall not make yourselves detestable by beast or by bird or by anything with which the ground crawls, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean. You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord, am holy and have separated you from the peoples that you should be mine." End quote. [00:12:26] This passage is really essential to a lot of the points I wanna make today. Note that there is separation. This language of separation is connected to the holiness. The people are to be holy because God has set them apart, so therefore the people are going to also separate animals into clean and unclean. [00:12:50] But Leviticus 20 does not say that eating an unclean animal makes somebody unclean. If that was the case, there would be a ritual mentioned here. What Leviticus 20, on the other hand, says, that they make themselves detestable by eating something unclean. That's not purity language. That's something different. Now, it could be connected, but again, the language of purification and impurification means that there is something to be done to be purified from that. Language of becoming detestable, on the other hand, means something else, and there's probably going to be a different kind of resolution to that than one of ritual. [00:13:37] So I just think it's exceptionally fascinating that we do not have the context of clean and unclean animals, like if you ate an unclean animal, it would make you unclean. That would seem very logical, wouldn't it? But that is not what we have in the text. And remember, we're being very careful with what the text actually says because this is how we can possibly think about it. [00:14:02] Now we do have a really interesting addition in Deuteronomy 14. In verse three. It says, quote, " You shall not eat any abomination. End quote. And then it lists animals people can eat, ox sheep, goat deer, gazelle, robuck, wild goat, ibix, antelope, and mountain sheep, and so on. It kind of repeats the dietary holiness material. Probably not as extensively. I haven't compared them exactly, but there's a repetition here and there is a connection with abominations. [00:14:44] But again, there's no purity language that is really associated directly. And being very careful here because purity language is going to be associated with purity rituals. That doesn't mean that if something is unclean, that it makes it sinful or something like that. And that's part of the distinction here. [00:15:08] So if you are going against the law and eating something that is not lawful for you to eat, it's not necessarily making you impure. It's not necessarily making you unclean. It's something that is wrong that probably needs forgiveness or resolution of some sort, but not within the sacrificial system. And that's really crucial to note because we don't wanna make the sacrificial system and their way of thinking about it something that it should not be. [00:15:41] And I'm afraid we do that all the time because we tend to associate clean and unclean with pure and impure. And then we tie that to sinful behavior. Something that is unclean, something that is impure, is not automatically sinful. Likewise, something that is sinful does not necessarily make you impure. [00:16:08] Now again, I'm not saying that purity laws have nothing to do with sin or moral behavior, but sin and moral behavior is part of that and is not subsumed by that. And the purity system has no resolution for a lot of things that we might expect it to have. [00:16:29] And so this is why it gets very difficult and you can see in all of these passages that I've read, how we can start blurring the lines really easily and we might want to say that something that makes people detestable or that is an abomination is something that is unclean or impure. And we really need to separate out these ideas because they're not necessarily in the same bucket. [00:16:56] Again, the danger here might be that we are getting overly analytical and trying to fit everything into really precise buckets. And I do not think we should do that. I really think we should resist that. But at the same time, we have clear categories that the text gives us. 'Cause we have separation and we have distinctions being made. But those distinctions are always tied to God's holiness and access to that holiness and God dwelling with the people. [00:17:28] That's really crucial because if that's what it's about, then it is not about primarily our sinful behavior or our uncleanness. That is part of the matrix, but it's not the largest umbrella. And it matters because that is tied to the meaning of these things. And because the text doesn't always come out and explain things because it doesn't need to, because the people would already understand it, we're gonna have to look at it in a narrative framework in order to tease out the meaning of it. [00:18:05] All right, so let's get back into our clean and unclean animals here. In Genesis seven, the distinction clearly has something to do with sacrifice, with animal hierarchy, with the future use of animals, and also preserved order after judgment. And in the later Torah, the distinction clearly also has something to do with holy status, what Israel may eat, and a separation from the nations. [00:18:35] So the real question is how do those things relate without collapsing into each other? Part of the way that I tend to try and think about it is to allow earlier contexts to be their own thing, but we also have to acknowledge it's a text. A text that is written by a people in their own context. [00:18:59] So because Genesis is earlier chronologically from say, Leviticus, it does have its own context. But it can also fit into that context of Leviticus simply because of the author's perspective, whether that's Moses or whoever else, that's something else we have to play into. It gets very complicated when you start trying to make those distinctions, but I really do think that we are smart enough to navigate that to some degree. [00:19:34] And so here we are asking what kind of distinction is the clean and unclean in Genesis seven? [00:19:43] Now, again, I mentioned an ancient Near Eastern context to all of this, the wider sacrificial context of the entire area. We know that they had sacrificial meals. We know they selected animals for particular reasons, and there is a ritual hierarchy and most of the time it is status- based, suitability for the people offering and where that's being offered and things like that. [00:20:13] Now, the broader ancient Near East does not simply have Israel's covenantal, dietary holiness system because none of them had the context of being a set apart people. But this is really helpful to see that even within the context of the author of the Torah, they could understand that there are pre Torah sacrificial differentiations that we would expect somebody like Noah to have. Because they knew that around them everybody had some sort of differentiation of animals. [00:20:55] So the clean and unclean distinction does not simply come from Leviticus. It is not only revealed at Sinai, and the people even at Sinai would understand that. They would understand that even outside of the nation of Israel, there are distinctive differences in animals. So the clean and unclean animals for Noah does not have to map exactly onto what we have in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the people themselves would understand that. [00:21:30] That is the most important point to take away from this whole concept because if we're only reading within the Bible and we're like, well, we only get the laws of eating in Leviticus, so how can Noah possibly know anything? Well, it's pretty easy to see that he can know something if you understand that the broader context, everybody had some sort of hierarchy in animal distinction with sacrifice and a proper eating. So it's not strange, but we don't have to map everything in Leviticus onto what Noah would have thought. [00:22:10] But prior to Leviticus and even prior to the Torah, clean and unclean can appear clearly as ritual and sacrificial suitability. Once we get to Sinai, those distinctions are drawn very particularly into the covenant identity of a holy people and what Israel eats becomes part of what Israel is. And because of that, diet is not the deepest category for clean and unclean animals, but holiness or status, or suitability is the deeper category, the deeper idea behind it. [00:22:50] Food becomes one expression of holiness, not the origin of the whole idea. [00:22:58] Alright, let's get into the particulars. First of all, I'm gonna talk about why this cannot be about diet alone. Our instinctive move is that clean and unclean animals simply means edible and inedible. And again, that can be part of it, but it doesn't adequately explain the category in Genesis seven by itself. So the Noah narrative forces a broader category than simply the rules of the menu. [00:23:29] And the first reason it can't be about diet alone is within Genesis itself. The first actual use of the animals is not for eating, but for sacrifice. We've already pointed that out. [00:23:43] And the second reason it cannot be about diet alone is that not all clean animals are simply reducible to eating. Even in the later Torah system, clean is a broader category than what you guys all are eating right now. An animal can be clean without the point of the text being merely that humans, or at least Israelites, can eat it. [00:24:09] Now, again, that's not against that context, but not all clean animals are in practice simply about ordinary diet. So the category has to be broader than consumption, although even when we get into the sacrificial context, that's going to connect directly into the diet context. [00:24:30] But what's really funny to me is that people will do that later on and say, well, okay, that's fine. But in Genesis four, it can't be about humans eating. Because they're just sacrificing. Well, if you make the distinctive difference, that sacrifice has nothing to do with diet at all, then why do we have Genesis four if we're presuming that they're not eating the animals? I'm just trying to point out some complicated things in all of this. [00:25:00] Now, a third reason that it can't be just about diet by itself is that the biblical impurity data is simply more complicated. Again, that's where we get Leviticus 1715 and things like that. We have nothing that says, eating an unclean animal makes someone ritually unclean. [00:25:21] The clearest, explicit impurity language connected to these animals is about touching their carcass when they're dead, carrying their carcass, or eating an animal that died naturally or was torn. And you might presume that that might be a clean animal, but it does not call out impure animals as something that makes you ritually unclean. But the impurity comes from carcasses or dead things and eating something that still basically has its blood in it. Leviticus 1715 doesn't explicitly mention blood, but that's probably the way we're supposed to be thinking about that because you're supposed to drain the blood out because you're not supposed to eat it. [00:26:08] Now, the fourth reason it can to be about just diet is that the later Torah itself ties food distinction to holiness status. So the rationale is holiness. You know, I know people love to try and bring the rationale into hygiene or health. Or sickness or disease or all of these other kinds of ideas that we want to put in. [00:26:33] And I think we do that because we want a really solid rationale, and I understand that, but the Bible gives us a really solid rationale. The solid rationale is because it's tied to holiness status. But because we don't really innately understand that today, that doesn't register to us as if it's important. [00:26:57] But that is the important thing. The important thing wasn't actually hygiene and it wasn't actually disease or health from eating the meat. The point really is about holiness. And I don't think we can understate that, but we just don't understand it today. It's something so outside the way that we think that we just kinda pass over that as if, oh yeah, it's just another mention of Christianese or Bible- ease holiness, but it's so very crucial to understanding why. [00:27:36] It gives us an actual reason. When it gives us a reason, why are we searching for other reasons that it mentions not at all. And that they wouldn't even understand. They didn't know about hygiene in the form of germs. They didn't know anything about diet as far as these animals would be more healthy for you to eat than these and so on. [00:28:00] So it's really not about health, nutrition, even convenience. But the text itself ties it to holiness, separation, and covenant identity. So even when we get to Sinai, diet is just not the deepest category. It becomes an expression of the people's status and of their relationship with God. So the whole thing is not about food in the abstract, but it is an expression of holiness. [00:28:33] And if you read much of the modern scholarship it consistently pushes against the food laws are mainly health laws because they understand that the stronger explanations emphasize holiness, symbolic order, and identity formation. [00:28:49] All right, now, if clean is not just about being edible, then perhaps it's mostly or only about sacrifice. But that answer also turns out to be too small. So let's talk about why it cannot be about sacrifice alone, either. The category of clean and unclean animals is too big for the diet, but also too big for sacrifice. [00:29:16] Just like diet, sacrifice is one major expression of suitability, status, and holiness, but it's not itself, the whole category. And the first reason that it can't be about sacrifice by itself is that the category is broader than any particular ritual or system. [00:29:37] If we try to fit that in, then we get explanations where Noah was told by God to do the sacrifice after the flood, but he's not told by God. He just does it. At least we aren't told that he was told by God. And so there is some sort of innate understanding that Noah already seems to have had, that this is the appropriate thing to do. [00:30:02] Again, we're wondering maybe how did he anticipate or know what the Levitical system is about? But instead of presuming that the Levitical system as it is now, but perhaps the Levitical system as it was revealed with Sinai is actually a particularization of something that already existed in everybody's minds. So what Noah is thinking and doing with his burnt offerings is, but is not exactly, the same as what we have in Leviticus. [00:30:38] The second reason it can't be about just sacrifice is that not all clean animals are used in sacrificial purposes. And I think that's pretty obvious. Nobody's going to be sacrificing wild mountain goats. The third reason it cannot be about sacrifice alone is that the ancient Near East, all of the evidence points to broader hierarchy and suitability. [00:31:04] Comparative work in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia shows us that sacrificial systems used restricted ranges of animals and did not treat all animals as equally eligible for offering for everyone. So there is an innate ritual hierarchy built into the entire worldview. [00:31:24] The fourth reason it cannot just be about sacrifice is that later Torah ties animal distinction to holiness status beyond the altar. It is not just about what goes on within the tabernacle. We have to include the idea of people eating the animals outside of that context. And they were clearly able and authorized to do that because it literally lists things that you could not sacrifice that they can still eat. But those things are still tied into the holiness and separation of the people. [00:32:03] Now, we could say that sacrifice is the most particular or the biggest example of that, but again, it's not exhaustive. [00:32:12] So the fifth reason that it can't be about sacrifice alone is that purification and sacrificial logic are related, but they're not identical. A sacrifice is not just one undifferentiated mechanism. We have purification atonement, sacred space restoration, and meal and gift logic, and those are all not the same thing. So clean and unclean animals aren't just equated with animals that go on the altar. [00:32:47] So if the category of clean and unclean animals is too big for diet and too big for sacrifice alone, then what sort of world does it belong to? How do we actually talk about it? [00:33:01] Now here's the fun part. Ancient Near Eastern animal hierarchy and sacrificial suitability information. Now, I've already touched on this again, have to mention the donkey episode. It's number 1 0 8 if you haven't listened to that. That episode is going to make it very clear that we have a hierarchy in animals even outside of Israel. And those ideas have something to do with suitability for the people and for the gods, and that's tied directly to a person's status and where and how you are offering something. And also just the general use and purpose of an animal. [00:33:42] There are so many things I could go into today, but I will keep a lot of details for later because we will be doing more animal episodes about particular types of animals and things. Just like with the donkey episode, once you start seeing all of the very particular things, then you're gonna see that you can't just flatten everything and act like everything in the past is just one conglomerate idea. [00:34:09] So ancient Mesopotamian religion and ritual used a lot of sacrifice. And those animals had particular meaning to those people. So if sacrifice is regular and structured in general, then the selection of the animal matters, the type of the animal matters, the entire ritual appropriateness matters. [00:34:33] So because Israel is already living in this world where pretty much everyone is going to understand some distinctive differences, then what we have with Noah doesn't have to be strange. And it also does not have to map exactly onto Leviticus and Deuteronomy. [00:34:51] Again, even in the ancient Near East, not all animals were equally fit for sacrificial use. It's just that in the Bible we have probably the most particular lists and particular mentions of the suitability for the animals. [00:35:09] We also have a different hierarchy in general, where some animals belong more naturally to labor, some to ordinary food use, and others to sacred offering. But along with just the suitability of the animal, we have the value and status and the prestige that an animal is going to give somebody. So animal choice in anything is gonna be about status and sacred order even outside of Israel. [00:35:40] Another really important point is how tied to eating and meals and just general animal distribution was in the context of sacrifice and just life in general in the ancient Near East. In case I haven't made the point yet today, sacrifice is not about killing. It is about feeding provision. It's about ritual meals. It's about distribution of animals and status. It is about fellowship even outside of Israel. Now, the people outside of Israel did not have the kind of covenantal relationship with their deities that Israel had, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist on some level. [00:36:27] The really broad and kind of apologetic and little bit of an ignorant way to see things, is that the people outside of Israel were only ever bribing their gods. I don't think that's fair to all of the people outside of Israel. I think more people were trying genuinely to connect with the divine and to connect with their gods in a way that was honest and forthright and not only manipulative. [00:36:59] Now, a lot of it is manipulative. This is, I think, one of the ways we can see really good or true ritual with manipulation and power and things like that when if you have some sort of leader or societal structure that is trying to get everybody on board with what they want and what the people in power want to accomplish, then that is different than what we have in the Hebrew Bible where the point is to be centered on God and relationship and covenant with God and not the individual desires and projects of the leaders of Israel. When the leaders of Israel became corrupt and they started using things in manipulative ways, that's where we get similar things to pagans in a very negative way. [00:37:58] I don't think that all pagans have to be painted with that brush because most people in the world are just doing the best they can do. And I think that is true for today and it's true for the past. So we really do need to be a little bit more careful to not just broad brush everybody who wasn't in relationship with Yahweh as if they were all doing the same exact terrible things, because I don't think they were trying to do that. And so there is this context of trying to fellowship with the divine in general. I think that was genuine in a lot of ways. [00:38:38] But let's talk a little bit more about this actual context of sacrifice, because it does belong to divine- human relationships in general. It's not just about killing the animal as some sort of show point of, look how sinful you guys are. You deserve to die, so we're gonna kill this animal. That's just not the context of sacrifice, because of the fact that the context is really more broadly about fellowship meals. [00:39:08] So sacrifice is not about death, it's about offerings, gifts, and life with God. [00:39:17] And so that meal logic matters crucially, and it's even within the Mesopotamian concept of religion and their rituals and the things that they're doing as well. I mean, I've brought up several times already the Mesopotamian flood accounts and how the sacrifice after the flood had the gods just ravenously hungry and eating the sacrifice. [00:39:40] Now we take that and I think we tend to apply that imagery broadly to every pagan doing sacrifice. And I just think that's unfair. I don't think that story necessarily means that everybody thought that their gods literally needed food in the same theological way that biblical readers might imagine. [00:40:04] But it does show us very strongly that sacrifice is framed by meal and offering logic. That is at its core. So now here we have the connection between the diet and the sacrificial context. [00:40:21] Another point I will bring up is that distribution and portions also matter. Sacrificial systems aren't just about the act at the altar. They're also about who receives what. How portions are handled. And where the animal goes within the ritual structure. This is one reason sacrifice cannot be reduced to killing an animal. The distribution logic shows that sacrifice and food overlap without becoming identical, but it's tied intimately to doing it in a proper way. [00:40:59] And again, this is widely across the board. For example, Hittite ritual meals explicitly discuss procedure leading to the meal, the participants in the meal, the sacrificial victims. And this is extremely useful to look at because it shows that ritual attention extends beyond the slaughter of the animal to the whole event of the sacred fellowship meal between humans and the divine, but also humans and each other because it creates a distinctive difference between priests and kings and common people and so on. [00:41:42] So if sacrifice has a distribution logic, then suitability matters for more than just one moment of that. It's about the offering. It is about the table. It is about the sacred roles and participation. And so when we get to Sinai, this is just expanded and contracted at the same time in a way that is very particular to the people of Israel. Their table itself becomes part of their holiness status. It doesn't cover the whole thing, but it is part of it. [00:42:20] And this helps to explain why animal hierarchy and meal hierarchy and sacrifice all belong together. The sacrifice is about a meal. Animals are sorted because they're not all equally fit to enter that ritual meal world. And so all of this evidence matters very much for the context of Noah and Genesis seven, because people are just presuming everyone understands that there are differentiated animals. Some animals are suitable for some things, some animals are not. And we have meal logic and sacrificial logic intimately tied together. [00:43:04] But it is important to go from this broader ancient Near Eastern context to the narrow Israel's holiness diet. Israel is not inventing the concept of clean and unclean, but it's also not copying it. It is using the context for a particular reason of showing who the people are in relation to God. Again, we have holiness distinction. There is no mention of health or nutrition and so on. I won't go ahead and repeat all of that, that I've already brought out in previous sections of this. You can see how all of this kind of flows in an actual historical way. [00:43:47] So I find that really interesting. If Noah had no understanding of distinctions between animals, that actually maybe would seem very strange. This doesn't mean that Israel's system is not distinctive because it is. But it's distinctive in the way that it ties all of that into the holiness of the people and their relationship to God. It's so particular in Israel and it's connected to a God who is for the people in total. Like God is so devoted to his people that he is the one who will fulfill the covenant in spite of the people. And I just think that is a very different way of looking at it from within Israel than it is in the broader ancient Near East. [00:44:38] But now I don't want you to be left thinking that these are the only interpretive lenses that we can use for the clean and unclean animals. There's a number of different other frames we could have here, and these are not necessarily all competitors or against the ideas I've already talked about. Some of them may be, but some of them could just be adjacent emphasis that can help to kind of align with these other ideas. [00:45:06] It is just worth noting that scholars also talk about things like symbolic order of the whole creation, and this can be even outside Israel and classification and things like that. Also, identity and boundary markers, even outside of Israel. There are social separation indicators in all of this and also things tied to particular yearly rituals and things like that. [00:45:35] Of course, it's not that this is not tied to purity, pollution, and graded holiness. It's just not tied to it in a way that we might have expected it to be. And a final idea that we have is the idea of ethics and ritual tied to teaching. I'll talk about that here in a second. Let me just lay out a little bit of these ideas that we have. [00:46:03] In regards to symbolic order and classification. This is very connected to Levitical studies where we're trying to understand the Leviticus system in a broader context and what do all of the prohibitions and allowances mean? And different scholars will go down different directions for this. Either we're talking about death versus life, or order versus chaos, or preserved creation and flourishing or ordered life through judgment and ideas like this. So in that sense, the classification and distinction of animals could be part of that broader symbolic mapping of creation and not just regulation of behavior. [00:46:50] Again, here, the animals are not primarily about health or even only about sacrifice, but about maintaining a symbolic order in creation. And this is tied to ideas like righteousness and justice because righteousness is going to be aligned with the order of creation. [00:47:10] This is actually a really strong supporting lane, but it doesn't have to be our controlling idea here, because it is a little bit more abstract, little bit more theoretical, little bit more theological, we might say. [00:47:26] Our second idea about identity boundary and social separation, it's that the laws don't just classify the animals, but they classify people. And that's pretty strong here in a biblical way when we have the evidence from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. But this is also not only within Israel. The hierarchy and the separation of people is very strong in Mesopotamian religion as well. [00:47:54] Now our third interpretive idea about purity pollution and graded holiness. Well, here we are placing the clean and unclean animals inside the matrix of ideas of holy versus common, clean versus unclean, pure versus impure, and access versus exclusion or exile or being cut off. Those are really strong categories to have in mind when you're looking at Levitical studies. [00:48:25] But what gets really confusing and complicated is that the clean and unclean animals, again, they're not identical to every kind of impurity. We want everything to fit in super neat boxes and it just doesn't. [00:48:42] Now, our weakest point here is about ethics. This is mostly in later Jewish and theological interpretations where clean and unclean animals become symbolic in a moral way. So the animals are teaching discernment and they symbolize virtues and vices, and they maybe train the people in moral attentiveness, things like that. [00:49:07] So this is more of a reception history lane than really primarily exegetical in Genesis seven and the Torah. Once you get down into these kinds of ideas, some of the interpretations can get pretty weird, especially in rabbinic interpretation. [00:49:25] And this is also honestly where our ideas of how the laws are gonna fit into health or nutrition is also going to fit. It's just not coming from the text itself. We are importing our own ideas and our own presuppositions and our own categories. I know that it's really hard not to, but this is one example of where we're really going out on some limbs and it's simply not exegetical. We aren't drawing it from the text. We're just trying to make sense of it in our own world. And as such, those are the ideas we should hold most loosely. [00:50:07] So of all of these additional ideas, the one that I think matters most for the next part of our conversation is the larger Levitical grammar of purity and access. So let's talk just briefly about how this relates to the Levitical purification system. But we're gonna be very careful. We're not gonna collapse the categories, and we're gonna try not to overstate things. It is hard to not do that though because we bring so much information and baggage and ideas into the Levitical purity purification system with atonement and things like that. [00:50:48] So again, categories that are related but not interchangeable. Clean and unclean animals, edible and inedible, sacrificial suitability, ritual impurity versus moral impurity. Although I really don't like distinguishing those two things the way that scholars tend to, but I understand why they do it. And also, of course, purification and atonement. It is a whole entire matrix of ideas that is really hard to navigate because it's so vastly different from the way that we think. [00:51:27] One of the biggest mistakes that we often make is treating all of Leviticus as though it were a flat system and all of the different offerings as being the same. But we do have distinctions and it's really important to see those. [00:51:45] Now, a really compressed way to see this, because I know we need some simple ways to look at it. First of all, food laws are classifying people more than anything. They're making people distinct and they're showing how people relate to God. They're also teaching something about how the clean and unclean distinction really matters for who they are as people and their behavior and way of life. [00:52:17] Then sacrifice is a type of hierarchy. It involves the human's relationship with the divine. And it is not about bribery. It is not fully about sin. It is about relationship and fellowship and things like that. [00:52:36] Then purification. Purification is a restorative idea. Purification is not about sin inherently, but it again still teaches distinctive differences between people, between God. And all of this is about God dwelling with his people, and the people responding to God and the people offering things to God and the people welcoming God and so on. [00:53:07] Like we tend to think so much about things being really, really one sided and we forget that a relationship has to be two-sided. And we think, oh, well salvation isn't works-based. And when we're presuming that the main problem or the main issue might be works-based salvation, again, we are just importing our ideas into the text in a way that is unfair and that is not drawing out the idea from the text itself. [00:53:40] Not everything is about salvation per se. And so the sacrificial system, not being a sin management system, means that importing the idea of works-based salvation into Leviticus is simply anachronistic. It is not what we're doing here in the text. [00:54:02] Now, one of the things I've been doing the last couple of months in my biblical theology community, On This Rock, we have been doing a really deep dive into the book Lamb of the Free by Andrew Rillera. If you guys wanna come and join us there, I would love to have you. Even if you are new to the book, even if you've already read it, even though we're halfway through the study. Doesn't really matter because there's videos you can watch. There's conversations you can join in. Just come on in and join us there because there's a lot to that book. And I have a lot of disagreement, but I have a lot of agreement and I think Rillera is doing some really excellent work to help us kind of untangle this knot. [00:54:50] But it's also a really hard book to read, not just because it's scholarly, which it is, but also because I think the book is rather disordered and not easy for somebody to follow if you're not already thinking about all of these things. So because of that, I would encourage you to come on and have conversations with us so that we can unpack it and look at it a little bit clearer and not quite so overwhelmingly. But he doesn't really get a whole lot into clean and unclean animals because he acknowledges that it's distinct from ritual impurity that we have going on in Leviticus. [00:55:31] Now, again, not everything is about atonement either because atonement is very specific. It's very tied to particular things in Leviticus and elsewhere, and it has much more to do with the sacred space and the tabernacle and all of the things in the tabernacle, because the point is not, again, sin management. The point is for God to dwell with his people. That's a different thing. [00:56:00] And now that does include some things about sin. So I would not say that nothing in the sacrificial system is about sin because that takes it too far. But we're importing too many ideas there. It gets too complex because we can't read it accurately in context. [00:56:22] So the clean and unclean animals aren't identical to ritual impurity, and I think that's pretty clear once you look at the actual text and the mentions of everything. But that doesn't mean they aren't tied at all to ritual impurity, because ritual impurity itself has something to do with holiness. [00:56:43] But again, if we're thinking of holiness as being about morality, then we also are not looking at that correctly. Morality has something to do with it. Absolutely. But it's not the way that we usually think of it. [00:56:58] I mentioned before, I do not really like the categories of ritual impurity and moral impurity because they're not in the text. But they're still going to use these categories simply because we just have such an overwhelming tendency to talk about impurity as if it's about morality, that they're trying to make a distinctive difference here and show that yes, there is morality and sin involved. But just because something is impure or makes you impure doesn't mean it's sinful. [00:57:34] Even though it is not a biblical way to distinguish these things, we do have different things that look different. So within the supposed ritual impurity category, impurity comes from contact with corpses, from childbirth, and from bodily discharges and skin disease. [00:57:56] And again, none of that is sinful. In the supposed moral impurity category, we have sins, the primary three of which are idolatry, bloodshed, and sexual abominations. And those are never ever dealt with within the sacrificial system. So the Bible does treat those differently, but they do affect holiness and sacred space at the same time. So it gets really complicated here. [00:58:29] Now we also have moral impurity on a lesser scale. And so the moral impurity gets further distinguished into major and minor things. And you see this is, I get why we're categorizing things in ways because we want to talk about them in a way that we can really distinguish and dismantle the problematic ways that we talk about it. Personally, I would still rather we could just keep with biblical categories and admit that impurity is not about sin. Although sin can be part of what makes the sancta and the sacred space impure. [00:59:11] Now, what's fascinating is how Rillera and others will talk about how the prophets will kind of broaden those categories of moral impurity, of idolatry and bloodshed and sexual immorality, and they'll connect it to other things like oppression and economic injustice and things like that. [00:59:33] So again, it's not that impurity has nothing to do with sin and are connected directly to our behavior, but the main thing to see is that the Levitical system was never intended to deal with all of it. And so I think that once we see that, we can see how clean and unclean animals are only another example or symbol of what's going on. [01:00:00] And obviously I don't have time to really unpack the idea here, but again, sacrificial suitability is not identical to purification logic. [01:00:10] So the clean and unclean animals that we have in the context of the flood and with Noah is not about the purity system of the tabernacle. Now that being said, I'm not sure that it's entirely distinct from that either, because as I've argued, I do believe that the Ark functions as a proto sacred space of some sort. And so the clean and unclean animals is gonna be a little bit tied up to that, right? [01:00:41] Once we go down the path of trying to really get speculative and try to come up with really distinct answers, that's our problem, not the text's problem. So they can be tied together without really being exactly tied together in the way that they are later. [01:01:00] When we're talking about purification and atonement, I think that the broader category is about restoring, disrupted sacred order, which is why it's so tied to the tabernacle. Purification and atonement that can't be reduced to or even really be about payment language, killing language... substitution, even, in the way that we think of it, if we're thinking of substitution as being replacement. Like you are taken out and the animals put in, doesn't make any sense in the Levitical logic because human blood would actually contaminate sacred space. [01:01:44] So if the real thing that is supposed to be happening is that your blood is supposed to be going in, then well your blood would defile. So if the animal is substituting for you in a way that it is a replacement for you, then why is the animal blood also not defiling things? [01:02:03] You see, these are the logical things. And again, I get that being a little bit theological and analytical with these ideas, what we really see in Leviticus is a problem of defilement and a need to purify it and a need to clean it. Something has been disrupted in the sacred order that needs to be resolved because God wants to dwell with his people, not because he wants to punish them or threaten them or say that you deserve death because you sinned. But access has been threatened by something. And so restoration, purgation, purification, cleansing, whatever word you want to use there, that needs to happen in order to keep this relationship and God dwelling with his people. [01:02:54] So this is where the clean and unclean discussion naturally belongs as part of the larger world of holiness and access. So Noah's clean and unclean distinction can be seen as part of a world in which sacred order matters, suitability matters, and not everything can equally enter sacred use and set people apart. [01:03:17] And really, I just, I think that the dietary laws as they are, they kind of sit awkwardly between sacrifice and purity. And I kind of think that that's part of the point of them. They're not just about sacrifice, they're not impurity laws in the same way that we have corpse contact or bodily discharge. [01:03:39] So they're kind of in a middle space where they classify life. They shape daily holiness. They mark identity. They intersect with sacrificial suitability, but they're not reducible to any one of those things. [01:03:55] So then the question is, how should we relate Noah to Leviticus? I think I've already made my point, basically. But to be clear, the clean and unclean distinction simply does not have to be the full Levitical purity code. That doesn't mean it's not tied to that, because remember, I like to point out that what a lot of Genesis is doing, especially the first 11 chapters, is it's providing the proto explanation and the proto origins of things. So therefore, we can get Leviticus later, and it integrates the distinctions into a more elaborate system of holiness, purity, access, sacrifice, purification, and all of that is within the context of the covenant with God. [01:04:50] So it shouldn't surprise us that we have examples and a world that already has kind of these distinctions and suitability hierarchies. We should see the whole concept as living in practice more than it's living in any kind of a codified law, and certainly not within analytical categories as if, whoa, no, we have a thing that just doesn't fit into our bucket and we have to figure out how to fit it into our bucket. [01:05:20] Well, maybe your bucket is just not the point. [01:05:24] It should not be problematic in any way, shape or form for Sinai to extend the previous concepts and the previous categories and distinctions into more specifics for the people's whole lives. That shouldn't surprise us or be strange at all. And this also explains why clean and unclean is neither merely symbolic nor merely practical. [01:05:51] It's not just an abstract symbol. It is embodied sacred order. It is embedded deeply into the context, and I think that's why we don't understand it, especially if we're the type of Christian who thinks that, oh, there is no sacred space in the world. The whole world is sacred, and we don't have to treat any particular place as special. We don't have to treat any particular thing as special because we have dismantled those distinctive differences, and I think that's a mistake. I don't think that's what the New Testament is doing. I don't think that's what Jesus is doing. [01:06:30] I don't think that's what's happening in the church. I do think there are changes that absolutely happen, but that is also the case here in Sinai. That's not a different dispensation. It's not a different covenant in the way that God is gonna work with us in vastly different ways. But we need to understand these things within our context and I've argued many times before that if we don't have any sacred space distinctions, if we don't take ritual in a really serious way that goes beyond symbolism and that touches our practical lives, then we are deeply, deeply impoverished. We are missing the narrative, we are missing the concepts. And I think that is very sad. It's not that you can't be Christian that way. It's not that you can't understand God that way. It's not that you can't have that relationship but why should we impoverish ourselves like that? I think we do ourselves an injustice by doing that. [01:07:32] And so that is why I think it is really essential to recover some of these things and recover that ancient mindset and do our best to try and see how the narrative and the story and the patterns matter so deeply. And in order to do that, I think we do have to do some analysis simply because otherwise, how are we going to access the meaning in order to see how that applies to us? But we have to do that carefully, and we have to be really gentle and acknowledge the fact that our ideas in our categories and our buckets are only representative. And they are not the thing itself. [01:08:18] Alright, let's go ahead and wrap all of this up. So going back to Noah what is the Ark preserving when it preserves the clean and unclean animals? Well, why does Genesis have this distinction through the flood? In fact, before the flood, I mean, at minimum, this shows that the Ark is preserving more than biological species, although it still can be part of that. Because again, if you're sacrificing animals or sending them out of the Ark, then you are removing the ability for the Ark to be that preservation for the species, right? [01:08:55] So there's that. We also, again, definitely have connection to future meals and future sacrifice. And clearly what we have is something that is preserving, ordered life, preserving creation, including a differentiated suitability, and it's absolutely connecting to holiness. [01:09:16] So the Ark is not just preserving life, but life with sacred differentiation built into it, and that has some sort of importance. Otherwise, why is it here? I also definitely wanna point out the crucial piece of post-judgment worship here, because Noah has to have capacity for rightly ordered worship after the judgment. The flood doesn't just end in survival, but it ends in worship. [01:09:44] When you see all of the different points and how their deeper ideas are not just about survival, but holy order after that judgment, then those are ideas we can take and look through the rest of the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament and so on. I really didn't get into any of the New Testament and the clean and unclean animals there. Some really fascinating concepts, but again, I'm sure I'm gonna be talking about animals more, so I'll try and hit on those kinds of things in future episodes. [01:10:17] But at any rate, I hope this conversation today has kind of opened up some doors and ways of thinking that don't just collapse the whole of Torah together into one thing. And you can see that there is actual historical progression even within the Torah, which can be really helpful in historical apologetics and things like that. [01:10:39] And we have more ideas than we might have thought in interpretations and things here as well. But thank you guys for listening and thank you guys for sharing the episodes. So thanks for listening. Thanks for participating, and again, welcome you into my biblical theology community where we are doing some interesting conversations there as well. [01:11:03] A special shout out to all of you who support me on that platform, who support me through Patreon and PayPal. I deeply appreciate it. You guys are absolutely amazing, and I'm really grateful for all of you listening, and for those of you who are supporting me in particular. But that is it for this week, and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.