Leviticus 11:2-47 Speak to the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which you shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.… The question will at once come up in every reflecting mind: Whence came this law? Could it have been merely an invention of crafty Jewish priests? Or is it possible to account for it as the product merely of the mind of Moses? It appears to have been ordered with respect to certain facts, especially regarding various invisible forms of noxious parasitic life, in their bearing on the causation and propagation of disease — facts which, even now, are but just appearing within the horizon of modern science. Is it probable that Moses knew about these things three thousand years ago? Certainly, the more we study the matter the more we must feel that this is not to be supposed. It is common, indeed, to explain much that seems very wise in the law of Moses by referring to the fact that he was a highly educated man, "instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." But it is just this fact of his Egyptian education that makes it in the last degree improbable that he should have derived the ideas of this law from Egypt. Could he have taken his ideas with regard, for instance, to defilement by the dead, from a system of education which taught the contrary, and which, so far from regarding those who had to do with the dead as unclean, held them especially sacred? And so with regard to the dietetic laws: these are not the laws of Egypt; nor have we any evidence that those were determined, like these Hebrew laws, by such scientific facts as we have referred to. Whence had this man this unique wisdom three thousand years in advance of his times? The secret will be found, not in the court of Pharaoh, but in the holy tent of meeting: it is all explained if we but assume that which is written in the first verse of this chapter is true: "The Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron:" (S. H. Kellogg, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth. |
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