daily java

Daily Java:

“These are the instructions regarding skin diseases and mildew.”  (Leviticus 14:57)

I have just finished reading a long, excruciatingly detailed list of things that were to be done if a rash or an open sore or anything else on the skin came up in the Israelite camp as they walked though the wilderness. It didn’t matter how small the rash or the sore, or small the mildewed section, it was to checked out ultimately, by a priest.

There were good reasons for this, I suppose. God was making sure that the Israelites stayed healthy, that hygiene was good. There were evidently some different strains of contagious diseases around then that looked like our leprosy and the like, so they had to be careful.

And it was a good thing too. Several years ago, I went to the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. As we were looking around, the guide made mention that the Anasazi (the dwellers) threw all their garbage and refuse, including human waste, in the back of the dwellings into caves and openings back there.

That meant that the whole thing not only smelled horrible all the time, but there would be times when disease would run rampant throughout the camp. Hygiene was horrible. Talk all you want about the American Indian and their nobility in living off the land. They were a filthy people. I remember someone in a movie coming into an Indian camp and saying, there’s the dump, now where are the houses. Then he found out those were the houses.

The Anazazi just disappeared from history. Lots of reasons have been given. One of them was the fact that they completely exhausted the area in which they lived of all wood and materials. They were going further and further away to get firewood and such that sooner or later, they had to move.

But it could be that disease took them. To me that sounds logical. You cannot live with an open toilet and garbage dump sitting right behind you and breathing that all the time without it affecting you. Chances are high they just died from the living conditions.

Beautiful houses, marvelous architecture in the cliff dwellings. But behind all that beauty was a festering sore of a dump. And in front of the dump was a group of people too stupid to throw their trash outside their camp.

God was not going to have the Israelites like this. He wanted them to stay healthy, so if he had to micromanage their hygiene, he would. And they were healthy. He wrote all this into their laws so they would remain this way until Jesus came. I am sure that compared to the people around them, they were quite picky in taking care of themselves and their families.

In times past, people were dirty. Even until just a half a century or so ago, people bathed once a week, washed their hair once a month if that often. Germs were unknown of until shortly after the Civil War 150 years ago. Even the need to wash our hands before doing major surgery is not that old a practice.

Today, we live in a world that is unbelievably clean. Our toilet waste is taken away somewhere else. Our garbage is carefully put into special containers and taken somewhere else. We bathe every day and our bathwater is taken somewhere else. It is all taken away from where we live. So unless, we are slobs, we can live what to former generations, would be an almost sterile lifestyle.

I am glad. I would hate to be dirty all the time, wearing the same clothing day after day. That wouldn’t be fun. Of course, to them it was perfectly normal. But in our eyes, there is no real need for instructions on skin disease and mildew.

I suppose that it wouldn’t be hard to degenerate back into that kind of society, but we would remember. I read a sci-fi book about a group of people who had their memories erased and were placed in a wilderness setting to see how soon they would come back to any degree of civilization. One man’s memory came back and all he could think of was clean sheets and a good smelling woman with him. He slept on hides and all of them reeked.

It would be the same with me. I like being clean.