Week 6 Leviticus 18
The final paragraph is pretty interesting. Moses is talking about the land of Canaan – which is Israel’s destination – and he says that the land has been defiled. That’s the word he uses…defiled. It basically means getting dirtied up. But there’s more to it. It’s like when something that people consider important has been desecrated. De-sacredized. Un-venerated. Like for instance if someone blew up a statute of the Buddha then that’s something way more than just physical property damage.
So Moses is talking about Canaan being degraded and defiled.
It sounds like something more than environmental degradation resulting from human stupidity or greed. If I pour toxic effluents into the lake and the water gets polluted that’s a pretty detectable cause-effect.
But Moses is making a less detectible connection. For about 18-verses he’s been listing sexual practices that he calls ‘defilements’. Moses says that the sexual practices have tarnished the people practicing them. But then he goes a bit farther and says those personal defilements have spilled over into the actual physical landscape of their near eastern homeland.
This link seems like mind-boggling lunacy here in Alberta where we mostly figure that sexual actions are personal and private and have no effect on anything. We know that mercury in the lake = contaminated fish. But sexual actions? No big outcomes.
Yet here in Leviticus 18 Moses identifies personal sexual tarnishments that expanded with enough symbiotic oomph to eventually taint the whole prairie.
Note: see Leviticus 18:24-30