| Back to Home Page | Back to Book Index
|
Leviticus
Chapter Twelve
Leviticus 12
Chapter Contents
Ceremonial purification.
After the laws concerning clean and unclean food, come
the laws concerning clean and unclean persons. Man imparts his depraved nature
to his offspring, so that, excepting as the atonement of Christ and the
sanctification of the Spirit prevent, the original blessing, "Increase and
multiply," Genesis 1:28, is become to the fallen race a
direful curse, and communicates sin and misery. Let those women who have
received mercy from God in child-bearing, with all thankfulness own God's
goodness to them; and this shall please the Lord better than sacrifices.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Leviticus》
Leviticus 12
Verse 1
And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
From uncleanness contracted by the touching
or eating of external things, he now comes to that uncleanness which ariseth
from ourselves.
Verse 2
Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If
a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean
seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she
be unclean.
Seven days —
Not for any filthiness which was either in the conception, or in bringing
forth, but to signify the universal and deep pollution of man's nature, even
from the birth, and from the conception. Seven days or thereabouts, nature is
employed in the purgation of most women.
Her infirmity —
Her monthly infirmity. And it may note an agreement therewith not only in the
time, Leviticus 15:19, but in the degree of
uncleanness.
Verse 4
[4] And
she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days;
she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days
of her purifying be fulfilled.
In the blood of her purifying — In her polluted and separated estate; for the word blood or bloods
signifies both guilt, and uncleanness, as here and elsewhere. And it is called
the blood of her purifying, because by the expulsion or purgation of that
blood, which is done by degrees, she is purified.
No hallowed thing —
She shall not eat any part of the peace-offerings which she or her husband
offered, which otherwise she might have done; and, if she be a priest's wife,
she shall not eat any of the tythes or first fruits, or part of the hallowed
meats, which at other times she together with her husband might eat.
Verse 5
[5] But
if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her
separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and
six days.
Threescore and six days — The time in both particulars is double to the former, not so much from
natural causes, as to put an honour upon the sacrament of circumcision, which
being administered to the males, did put an end to that pollution sooner than
otherwise had been.
Verse 6
[6] And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or for a
daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt offering, and a
young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering, unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest:
For a son or a daughter — For the birth of a son, or of a daughter: but the purification was for
herself, as appears from the following verses.
A sin-offering —
Because of her ceremonial uncleanness, which required a ceremonial expiation.
Verse 8
[8] And
if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two turtles, or two
young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the other for a sin
offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be
clean.
The morality of this law obliges women who
have received mercies from God in child-bearing, with all thankfulness to
acknowledge his goodness to them, owning themselves unworthy of it, and (which
is the best purification) to continue in faith, and love, and holiness, with
sobriety.
── John Wesley《Explanatory Notes on
Leviticus》
12 Chapter 12
Verses 1-8
She shall Be unclean.
Birth-sin and its developments
The theme of the chapter is the same as that of the one preceding
and the one following. The subject is sin, portrayed by symbols. In the
division of the animals into clean and unclean we had the nature of sin in its
general character and outward manifestations. It is a brutalisation of
humanity. It has its type in all sorts of savage, noxious, vile, annoying
creatures. But this chapter presents another and still more affecting phase of
man’s corruption. Surveying those masses of sin and vileness which hang about our
world, the question arises, Whence comes it? How are we to account for it? It
is useless to attribute it to errors in the structure of society, for society
itself is the mere aggregate of human life, feelings, opinions, intercourse,
agreement, and doings. It is man that corrupts society, and not society that
corrupts man. The one may react very powerfully upon the other, but the errors
and corruptions in both must have a common source. What is that seat?
Penetrating to the moral signification of this chapter, we have the true
answer. Sin is not only a grovelling brutality assumed or taken upon a man from
without. It is a manifestation which comes from within. It is a corruption
which cleaves to the nature, mingles with the very transmissions of life, and
taints the vital forces as they descend from parent to child, from generation
to generation. We are unclean, not only practically and by contact with a bad
world, but innately. We were conceived in sin; we were shapen in iniquity. And
it is just this that forms the real subject of this chapter. It is the type of
the source and seat of human vileness. The uncleanness here spoken of is no
more a real uncleanness than that attributed to certain animals in the
preceding chapter. The whole regulation is ceremonial, and not at all binding
upon us. It is an arbitrary law, made only for the time then present, as a
figure of spiritual truths. Its great significance lies in its typical nature.
And a more vivid and impressive picture can hardly be conceived. It imposes a
special legal disability upon woman, and so connects with the fact that “the
woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Timothy 2:14). It is a vivid
remembrancer of the occurrences in Eden. It tells us that we all have come of
sinful mothers. It portrays defilement as the state in which we receive our
being; for “who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one” (Job 14:4). You may plant a good seed, and
surround it with all the conditions necessary to a goodly plant; but it may put
forth so eccentrically, or meet with some mishap in the incipient stages of its
development, in consequence of which all its subsequent growth will be marred,
and all its fruits give evidence of the adversities that befell it in the
beginning. You may open a pure fountain, giving forth nothing but pure, good
water; yet the issuing stream may touch upon poison and take up turbid
corn-mixtures at its first departure from its source, and so carry and show
pollution whithersoever it goes. And so it has been with humanity. It was
created pure and good, but by that power of free choice which necessarily
belongs to a moral being some of its first movements were eccentric and
detrimental to its original qualities. It absorbed vileness at its very
beginning; and hence all its subsequent develop-merits have upon them the taint
of that first mishap and contagion. It is worse in some lines than in others.
The operations of Divine grace in the parent doubtless help to enfeeble it in
the child. Now it is just to this universal taint of human nature, derived from
the defection of Adam, that the whole outgrowth of this world’s iniquity is to
be traced. By virtue of our relation to an infected parentage we come into the
world with more or less affinity for evil. The presentation of the objects to
which this proclivity leans awakens those biases into activity. This awakening
of the power of lust is what we call temptation. There is an innate taint or
bias, the presentation to which of the objects of evil desire involuntarily
excites lust; and from this has flown out the flood of evil which has deluged
all the earth. (J. A. Seiss, D. D.)
In the eighth day the
flesh . . . shall be circumcised.
The ordinance of circumcision
Although the rite of circumcision here receives a new and special
sanction, it had been appointed long before by God as the sign of His covenant
with Abraham (Genesis 17:10-14). Nor was it, probably,
even then a new thing. That the ancient Egyptians practised it is well known;
so also did the Arabs and Phoenicians; in fact, the custom has been very extensively
observed, not only by nations with
whom the Israelites came in contact, but by others who have not had, in
historic times, connection with any civilised peoples, as, e.g., the
Congo negroes and certain
Indian tribes in South America. The fundamental idea connected with
circumcision by most of the peoples who have practised it appears to have been
physical purification; indeed, the Arabs call it by the name tatur, which
has this precise meaning. And it deserves to be noticed that for this idea
regarding circumcision there is so much reason in fact that high medical
authorities have attributed to it a real hygienic value, especially in warm
climates. No one need feel any difficulty in supposing that this common
conception attached to the rite also in the minds of the Hebrews. Rather all
the more fitting it was, if there was a basis in fact for this familiar
opinion, that God should thus have taken a ceremony already known to the
surrounding peoples, and in itself of a wholesome physical effect, and constituted
it for Abraham and his seed a symbol of an analogous spiritual fact, namely,
the purification of sin at its fountain-head, the cleansing of the evil nature
with which we all are born. When the Hebrew infant was circumcised it was an
outward sign and seal of the covenant of God with Abraham and with his seed to
be a God to him and to his seed after him; and it signified further that this
covenant of God was to be carried out and made effectual only through the
putting away of the flesh, the corrupt nature with which we are born, and of
all that belongs to it, in order that, thus circumcised with the circumcision
of the heart, every child of Abraham might indeed be an Israelite in whom there
should be no guile. And the law commands, in accord with the original command
to Abraham, that the circumcision should take place on the eighth day. This is
the more noticeable, that among other nations which practised or still practise
the rite the time is different. The Egyptians circumcised their sons between the
sixth and tenth years, the modern Mohammedans between the twelfth and
fourteenth. What is the significance of this eighth day? In the first place, it
is easy to see that we have in this direction a provision of God’s mercy; for
if delayed beyond infancy or early childhood, as among many other peoples, the
operation is much more serious, and may even involve some danger, while in so
early infancy it is comparatively trifling, and attended with no risk. Further,
by the administration of circumcision at the very opening of life it is
suggested that in the Divine ideal the grace which was signified thereby, of
the cleansing of nature, was to be bestowed upon the child, not first at a late
period of life, but from its very beginning, thus anticipating the earliest
awakening of the principle of inborn sin. But the question still remains, Why
was the eighth day selected, and not rather, e.g., the sixth or seventh,
which weald have no less perfectly represented these ideas? The answer is to be
found in the symbolic significance of the eighth day. As the old creation was
completed in six days, with a following Sabbath of rest, so that six is ever
the number of the old creation, as under imperfection and sin, the eighth day,
the first of a new week, everywhere in Scripture appears as the number symbolic
of the new creation, in which all things shall be restored in the great
redemption through the Second Adam. The thought finds its fullest expression in
the resurrection of Christ, as the Firstborn from the dead, the Beginning and
the Lord of the new creation, who in His resurrection body manifested the
firstfruits in physical life of the new creation, rising from the dead on the
first, or, in other words, the day after the seventh, the eighth day. (S. H.
Kellogg, D. D.)
Her purifying.--Purification after child-birth
The teaching of this law is twofold: it concerns, first,
the woman, and, secondly, the child which she bears. As regards the woman, it
emphasises the fact that, because “first in the transgression,” she is under
special pains and penalties in virtue of her sex. The capacity of motherhood,
which is her crown and glory, though still a precious privilege, has yet been
made, because of sin, an inevitable instrument of pain, and that because of her
relation to the first sin. We are thus reminded that the specific curse
denounced against the woman (Genesis 3:16) is no dead letter, but a
fact. No doubt the conception is one which raises difficulties which in
themselves are great, and to modern thought are greater than ever.
Nevertheless, the fact abides unaltered that even to this day woman is under
special pains and disabilities inseparably connected with her power of
motherhood. But why should all the daughters of Eve suffer because of her sin?
Where is the justice in such an ordinance? A question this is to which we
cannot yet give any satisfactory answer. But it does not follow that because in
any proposition there are difficulties which at present we are unable to solve
therefore the proposition is false. And, further, it is important to observe
that this law, under which womanhood abides, is after all only a special case
under that law of the Divine government by which the iniquities of the fathers
are visited upon the children. It is most certainly a law which, to our
apprehension, suggests great moral difficulties, even to the most reverent
spirits; but it is no less certainly a law which represents a conspicuous and
tremendous fact, which is illustrated, e.g., in the family of every
drunkard in the world. And it is well worth observing that while the ceremonial
law, which was specially intended to keep this fact before the mind and the
conscience, is abrogated, tile fact that woman is stiff under certain
Divinely-imposed disabilities because of that first sin is reaffirmed in the
New Testament, and is by apostolic authority applied in the administration of
Church government (1 Timothy 2:12-13). But, in the
second place, we may also derive abiding instruction from this law concerning
the child which is of man begotten and of woman born. It teaches us that not
only has the curse thus fallen on the woman, but that, because she is herself a
sinful creature, she can only bring forth another sinful creature like herself;
and if a daughter, then a daughter inheriting all her own peculiar infirmities
and disabilities. The law, as regards both mother and child, expresses in the
language of symbolism those words of David in his penitential confession (Psalms 51:5). Men may contemptuously call
this “theology,” or even rail at it as “Calvinism”; but it is more than theology,
more than Calvinism; it is a fact, to which until this present
time history has seen but one exception, even that mysterious Son of the
Virgin, who claimed, however, to be no mere man, but the Christ, the Son of the
Blessed! And yet many, who surely can think but superficially upon the solemn
facts of life, still object to this most strenuously, that even the new-born
child should be regarded as in nature sinful and unclean. Difficulty here we
must all admit--difficulty so great that it is hard to overstate it--regarding
the bearing of this fact on the character of the holy and merciful God, who in
the beginning made man; and yet, surely, deeper thought must confess that
herein the Mosaic view of infant nature--a view which is assumed and taught throughout
Holy Scripture--however humbling to our natural pride, is only in strictest
accord with what the admitted principles of the most exact science compel us to
admit. For whenever, in any case, we find all creatures of the same class
doing, under all circumstances, any one thing, we conclude that the reason for
this can only lie in the nature of such creatures, antecedent to any influence
of a tendency to imitation. If, for instance, the ox everywhere and always eats
the green thing of the earth, and not flesh, the reason, we say, is found
simply in the nature of the ox as he comes into being. So when we see all men
everywhere, under all circumstances, as soon as ever they come to the time of
free moral choice, always choosing and committing sin, what can we
conclude--regarding this not as a theological, but merely as a scientific
question--but that man, as he comes into the world, must have a sinful nature?
And this being so, then why must not the law of heredity apply, according to
which, by a law which knows of no exceptions, like ever produces its like?
Least of all, then, should those object to the view of child-nature which is
represented in this law who accept these commonplaces of modern science as
representing facts. Wiser it were to turn attention to the other teaching of
the law, that, notwithstanding these sad and humiliating facts, there is
provision made by God, through the cleansing by grace of the very nature in
which we are born and atonement for the sin which without our fault we inherit,
for a complete redemption from all the inherited corruption and guilt. And
especially should Christian parents with joy and thankfulness receive the
manifest teaching of this law, that God our Father offers to parental faith
Himself to take in hand our children, even from the earliest beginning of their
infant days, and, purifying the fountain of their life through “a circumcision
made without hands,” receive the little ones into covenant relation with
Himself, to their eternal salvation. (S. H. Kellogg D. D.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》