Badgers & Blood
It’s important that we seek to understand Leviticus on its own terms, not our terms.
So, how should we think about this strange stuff about not eating certain foods and the impurity of blood associated with childbirth?
Key idea: the Israelites had certain ideas about the things that were death-like and the purity laws taught that to come into the presence of life, the Israelites needed to be sure not to have become “contaminated” by deathly things.
AND
“Impure” or “unclean” was not something morally evil. It had nothing to do with sin. It was like “contamination”—it just had to be cleaned off before you could approach God’s presence. A surgeon going into surgery scrubs in before he begins to operate. Think of impurity or uncleanliness in that category.
Food Stuff
Some of the forbidden foods were foods that they would have considered disgusting;
Some of the forbidden foods were foods that the surrounding cultures would perhaps have eaten, so the food laws kept Israel separated;
Some of the forbidden foods were animals that blurred the lines between categories. Consider a shellfish, for example—is it a fish or something else? As we will see with later things, things that blurred category lines were things in the Israelite mind that seemed to tend toward death, since they were examples of disorder, and disorder meant death.
Which brings us to blood and childbirth.
Blood and Childbirth
Children are a gift from God.
But to the Israelite mind, blood was meant for life, and bodily fluids were meant to remain inside the body. So, when bodily fluids leaked, it was an impurity—since it suggested death—and it meant that the person—in this particular case, a woman who had just given birth—was ritually impure and needed to work through purification rituals before coming back into the presence of God.
The Point of All of This
God is teaching the Israelites that sin and death cannot coexist in the presence of God. And, to their way of thinking, coming into contact with the various forbidden foods and bodily fluids (outside the body!) were ways of coming into contact with deathly things.
P.S. All of this sacrificial and purity system was fulfilled and made obsolete by the death and resurrection of Jesus. So, Christians can come to the Father through faith in the Son, and we then live in the life of the Spirit. Jesus was the true and ultimate sacrifice, and Christians no longer have to live under the sacrificial system of the Old Testament.
