The book study this week dealt with Jesus and the 10 lepers. We have long been told that the isolation of lepers was an application of scientific wisdom long before it was understood in any other context.
Well, yes it could be said that this quarantining did help protect those uninfected. However, it is now known that extensive contact is necessary io transmit the disease to others.
How the following precautions help I'm not sure. '"his garments should be torn and his head should be left ungroomed and he should cover over his mustache and call out, ‘Unclean, unclean!" Lev 13:45.
The idea of loving provision for the sick doesn’t seem to have be very well understood back then. These unfortunate people shunned for no fault of their own were further condemned by Jesus it seems for forgetting to say thankyou when this was reversed.
Anyway, back to Leviticus. Right, it’s OK. When you are better, there is a procedure to ensure your cleanness. Just see the priest, get a couple of birds, use one living one to spray the blood of the other unlucky one (with some scarlet and hyssop) over you, sleep outside your tent for a week and you should be fine. Phew, that’s all right then.
So when the WT in all its wisdom said the following last year the nonsense and witchdoctor cures contained in Leviticus are worth examining. You can't claim that the text is written by the god of the universe when it contains a germ of wisdom on one hand without questioning the superstitious claptrap on the other.
MEDICINE
THE BIBLE, THOUGH NOT A MEDICAL TEXTBOOK, CONTAINS SOME PRINCIPLES THAT REFLECT ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE OF HEALTH.
Isolating sick people.
The Mosaic Law prescribed keeping people with leprosy separate from others. Not until the plagues of the Middle Ages did medical doctors learn to apply this principle, which is still deemed effective. Leviticus Chapters 13 and 4
wp18 No. 1 p. 6