Holy\' and \'Clean\' With Israelites

¶ … holy' and 'clean' with Israelites

The Old Testament was a document of great importance for the ancient people, as they drew much of their principles from this document. Tremper Longman's "An Introduction to the Old Testament" goes at providing readers with insight on the ancient texts. Concepts such as "pure" and "holy" are often related to in the book, with the writer attempting to shed more light on the dilemma regarding what were the values that the Old Testament was promoting.

The people of Israel wanted to keep God's camp pure and in order for this to be possible only certain individuals were granted permission to enter the camp, depending on their cleanness. One's purity was determined on account of the experiences that he or she came across during their lives. Skin malady, corporal discharges, the touching of unclean objects, and eating food that was deemed to be unclean were just some of the factors which rendered a human being unclean.

One of the main reasons offered by priest regarding the motive for the fact that only "clean" people were allowed into the camp was that it was the request of God Himself. They claimed that God wanted this in order to keep the children of Israel safe and outside of any physical or mental danger. Apparently, God "was protecting them, for instance, from birth defects due to incest by the laws in Leviticus 18 and 20" (Longman, 1994, 81). However, such assumptions are unlikely to be true and this can be proved through the fact that Jesus Christ did not share these beliefs. Given the fact that Christ did not consider that certain food which was thought to be unclean to be actually impure, one can easily conclude that the ancient Jewish people were not necessarily interested in hygiene when considering that particular food products were unclean. Thus, it means that the concept of unclean was interpreted in a much more complex way by the ancient people of Israel. Their reluctance to share the holy camp with people they did not consider worthy of this privilege was based on a series of reasons which cannot be explained logically.

One of the most plausible reasons one can presently find for why ancient priests in Israel did not allow a series of people into the holy camp can be the fact that everyone was considered to be impure and unholy. Mankind was predisposed to committing sin, thus it is less likely that there actually was someone among the people of Israel who could enter the camp because of his cleanness and because of his or her holy characteristics. Looking further into the condition, it is obvious that God was the only one holy and pure, while no man was worthy of complying with the demands imposed by priests. In order for them to have the right to enter the tabernacle, priests obviously had to be both holy and pure. This meant that their behavior had to be extremely strict and that they had to commit sacrifices, so as to prove the devotion that they had to God.