This week we will be closing up Mark chapter one with the shocking story of Yeshua/Jesus healing the leper. We’ll talk about Biblical tzara’at vs modern-day leprosy aka Hansen’s disease, and cover a bit of Torah portion Metzora, which covers skin diseases. I will also be talking about lashon hara, evil speech, and what we can learn about how we are to control our tongues based on Miriam’s affliction and in light of the George Floyd tragedy.
Transcript Below
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Gospel of Mark 8: Messiah and Metzora
40 And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” 41 Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” 42 And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. 43 And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, 44 and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” 45 But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.
Oh my, well that could have gone better, right?
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. My reading list for these studies can be found in the transcript for part two of this series on my blog.
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. I’m not prejudiced. Except, some of you need to realize that turn signals are just not optional, you know what I’m sayin?
This week we are finishing up Mark chapter one and since that has taken us nine weeks, I will probably be teaching this Gospel until I die. No, seriously, the deal is that when starting out any study there are some foundational things that have to be covered at the beginning that we will be able to skim over later. We don’t have to talk about what the Gospel is anymore, or why Yeshua/Jesus used Son of Man instead of Messiah, and we have covered fishing and cosmic battles and a whole lot of stuff that we can just briefly mention in future teachings. Just like, after this week I won’t have to go through Biblical tzara’at, translated as leprosy, again in this amount of detail. Just FYI, the extra books I consulted for this week are Leviticus by Jay Sklar, Leviticus by Jacob Milgrom, The Purity Texts by Hannah Harrington, and The Kehati Mishnah Commentary, Tractate Nega’im. And before you are too impressed, no I didn’t read all those this week—except for the bulk of Nega’im—I read two of them years ago and consulted them and a third one I just consulted.
Now, before I start through this week’s Scripture session, I want to introduce you to a second-century writing called the Egerton Papyrus 2, which can be found online and will be available in the transcript on Friday http://www.kchanson.com/ANCDOCS/greek/egerton.html
Now, the Egerton Papyrus is interesting because it contains fragmented accounts of the works of Yeshua that do not show up, in this form, in the Gospels. Now, they are very much like biblical accounts but they obviously aren’t from a copy of the canonical. There aren’t a bunch of copies out there—in fact, there is only one. Perhaps they were written by someone who knew the accounts orally and was composing something from memory and mashed accounts together. Let’s look at one of the two legible fragments because it is important for understanding the ideas about tzara’at during those times:
. . . to gather stones together [to stone] him. And the rulers laid their hands on him to [deliver] him to the crowd. But they were not able to arrest him since the hour of his being handed over had not yet come. But the Lord himself escaped from their hands and turned away from them.
And behold, a leper coming to him, says: “Teacher Jesus, while traveling with lepers and eating together with them in the inn, I myself also became a leper. If therefore you will, I will be clean.”
And the Lord said to him: “I will, be clean.”
And immediately the leprosy left him. And Jesus said to him: “Go show yourself to the priests and offer concerning the purification as Moses commanded and sin no more […]”
Now, we obviously don’t have an account in Scripture where they did this, where they made an actual move to stone him and where the leaders were actually able to lay hands on Him—we have something similar in Luke chapter four, but not close enough. But what I want to focus on is the remark from the leper because it will represent contemporary beliefs about leprosy, not to be confused with modern-day Hansen’s disease. But the leper who approaches Him and says, “Teacher Jesus, while traveling with lepers and eating together with them in the inn, I myself also became a leper. If therefore you will, I will be clean.” Now, we think of things being contagious, and (this is interesting) scientists still have no idea how Hansen’s disease is spread from person to person. But whoever wrote this wouldn’t have been thinking in those terms. It was believed, in Biblical times, that these sorts of skin afflictions (but not all) were a curse from God and therefore curable only by God. “Lepers” were considered to be afflicted and under a curse and therefore inherently unclean on the outside and sinful on the inside. They believed in just cause—if you had this affliction it was because you deserved it. This would be a good time to point out that dermatologists and other leprosy experts tell us that the description of leprosy in Scripture, that which afflicted Miriam, Uzziah, and Naaman the Syrian, is not what we see today. It is entirely different. But the word tzara means “to have a skin disease.” And in reading Leviticus 13 and 14, a whole lot of things are included under the banner—including boils, burns, ringworm, and a host of other skin issues. But here, from the context, we are dealing with people who have a serious, incurable condition that only God can heal.
I have spoken in the past about the ancient beliefs about inns and innkeepers. You didn’t go there unless you had to because the people there were just horrid. Well, in this case, although lepers are barred from living in Jerusalem and other walled cities, they can evidently be found in inns. Now, whether this is true or not, or just a stereotypical projection about how horrible inns were and the people who frequented them, we just don’t know. But this leper claimed that he was traveling with lepers, with the unclean—ON PURPOSE—and eating with them and, surprise, surprise, he became leprous. Here’s the deal, anyone reading this account would feel zero pity for this dude. I don’t want to be crude, but the closest comparison I can come up with at my age is remembering when they closed the San Francisco bath-houses in the mid-’80s because of AIDS and then some of them reopened and people went back and used them for the purpose for which they existed, which was not to take baths, and contracted AIDS. How we felt about people brazenly associating with something known to invite disease, which we all thought was going to kill us all back then—that’s how the reader would think of this leper. “He doesn’t deserve healing. He wanted to be with the lepers so now he can be one himself! He made his bed and now he can lie in it!” But in this account, Yeshua still heals him. You see how shocking this account is in this “unknown gospel”? With that in mind, let’s go to this week’s Scriptural account.
40 And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.”
We have already looked at, from that fragment, how people of the times would have filled in the blanks. “He’s a leper, wonder what he did to deserve that?” The Greek word translated leper is lepros and it obviously where we get the English borrow word. But this leper should not have approached Yeshua like this. According to the Levitical commandments that we see in Lev 13, he should have stayed at a distance and covered his lip with his garment and cried out “Unclean! Unclean!” as a warning to people not to get too close. Tzara’at was not only physically unpleasant but also humiliating and devastating in every way imaginable. We have some accounts in Rabbinic writings about how lepers were treated, and it is really very upsetting, but we also have some surprising (to me) inclusions that were unexpected. Before I go into the negative stuff, I want to point out that lepers were not barred from the synagogue. They could attend if they came long before anyone else arrived and left long after everyone else and stayed behind a screen. Obviously, this was when synagogues were formal buildings later. We know this from M. Nega’im 13.12
A different picture is presented in a later rabbinic text in which rabbis argue one should not pass within four cubits to the east of a leper or within one hundred cubits when a wind was blowing. Another tradition (from Lev Rabbah 16:3) relates that when a certain rabbi saw a leper, he would throw stones at him and shout: “Go to your place and do not defile other people.”[1]
Not exactly dripping with compassion. From M. Nega’im 13.7 we also see that it was believed that you could be defiled by a leper for being under the same tree. I cannot stress enough what a horrible fate it was to be afflicted in this way in an age where no one had the luxury or desire to be introverted. The community was your life and your life was the community. To be cut off was a fate worse than death, and lepers not only were shunned but also looked to be dead physically.
Second thing I want you to notice now that we have a few of these accounts available. Yeshua didn’t go out seeking the leper, the leper sought Him. Yeshua went out preaching, and when He did that the sick came to Him. It was not His mission to heal but to preach—and that’s about to become a severe problem. So the leper came to him and begged and kneeled before him. Did he go so far as to grab around his feet or knees as was customary in begging favors from a would-be patron? The text does not say. It was certainly forbidden for him to touch Yeshua or anyone. What the leper says is fascinating, “If you will, you can make me clean.” Notice there is no trace of doubt. No questioning “Can you heal me? Is it possible?” No—there is only the questioning of whether or not Yeshua wants to do it or not. Can you blame him for wondering if Yeshua would want to heal someone considered by everyone else to be a terrible sinner enjoying his just desserts? He is used to being the lowest of the low, an untouchable. This healer and miracle worker standing before him is great—but will he stoop to healing a leper? Certainly, He can do it, but why would he want to? And yet, despite the overwhelming likelihood that he will be rejected, he approaches, when he shouldn’t, and begs when he shouldn’t.
41 Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.”
Maybe you’ve heard this controversy. The word translated “moved with pity” is orgizo which means angry and it comes from a very early manuscript. Scholars wrestle with this greatly. It isn’t likely that it is there by accident or by scribal mistakes because who would make that mistake? Translators like to translate it as “moved with compassion” and later manuscripts often change the word altogether to Splagchnizomai which does mean to be moved with compassion. But there are other words in this account which are clearly anger, and not compassion, related that we can’t ignore. So, moved with anger, and we can ignore that for the moment and come back to it at the very end, Yeshua does the unthinkable. He doesn’t cure the leper with a word but with a touch. He actually makes the effort of stretching out His hand and touching him. He says that it is His desire to, in fact, heal and to make the man clean. Now I have had people protest, “But it didn’t make Him unclean, Yeshua can’t be unclean because that’s a sin.” Well, that’s nonsense. Everyone gets unclean sometimes and through natural bodily functions. Sex between a husband and wife is a good and holy thing, right? Well, it also makes them both unclean. A woman’s menstrual cycle makes her unclean. Giving birth to a child makes her unclean. It isn’t a big deal and it isn’t sinful—it just requires ritual bathing and only temporarily excludes someone from visiting the Temple until the next day because, after ritual bathing, the person is only unclean until sunset and then they are fresh as a daisy the next day. So yes, Yeshua would have had to ritually bathe after this because He became temporarily unclean. Big deal. He was up in the Galilee. I once asked someone why He could get away with this and the person answered that it was because He was a priest but that displayed a lack of knowledge about priests. Priests were not exempt from becoming unclean! They were exactly like everyone else. For a priest to examine a leper was an act of compassion and love and it would render them unclean until sundown and unable to eat holy food. But there is very little understanding of the concept of ritual purity and uncleanness in the general teaching population and even among people who consider themselves to be Torah teachers. Yeshua could be unclean, it didn’t affect His status one iota. In fact, the fascinating thing about this is that He became unclean as the leper became clean! I wish I could remember which commentary pointed this out but this is exactly what Paul was talking about when He said that Christ became a curse for us in Galatians 3:13. He became what we were so that we could become what He is. We are all this leper. He comes preaching, God the Father draws us to Himself through this itinerant teacher, we come before Him in our need and finally truly seeing ourselves for what we are and we beg Him to make us clean and He does. He touches us with a touch that cost Him immeasurably in terms of the Cross, becoming sin for our sake, becoming unclean—I Cor 5:21 “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
I feel somehow like the rest of the teaching is going to be a letdown from here—maybe I should have built up to that but as I write this I am still recovering from a minor stroke and so I am not very organized and I don’t really feel like fixing this. It is what it is.
Oh, He reached out and touched him—good thing I made extensive notes before all this happened. Do you remember the arm of the Lord episode I did for Isaiah and the Messiah part 13? This ties directly into that. The Qumran covenanters, possibly Essenes, translated Isaiah in such a way that they called the “arm of the Lord” the Messiah. Repeatedly, Mark shows Yeshua stretching out His hand, extending His arm, to reach out, to lift up and to touch those in need of deliverance, healing, and acceptance.
42 And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.
Now, the leprosy must have been very visible because the account says that it left him and he was made clean. If you look through Nega’im in the Mishnah and Gemara (and that is no light reading), and Leviticus 13 and 14, you will get an idea of how drastically the appearance of the condition must have changed “immediately.” The Talmud (comprised of the Mishnah (legal rulings) and Gemara (legal arguments) goes into great detail about the shades of white and color of hairs and all that and making sure to note the difference between going bald and being a leper! This wasn’t a small or questionable thing that Yeshua did for this man, it was shocking and indisputable. He was made clean.
43 And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once,
Remember I told you about the word above that said that Yeshua was very angry but gives no hint as to why? Well, here we have more anger language. “Sternly” doesn’t really cut it. The word here is embrimaomai and it means rebuke but it also carries the feeling of “scarcely controlled animalistic fury” when used elsewhere. In fact, disturbingly, it is the word used in the Septuagint form of Daniel 11:30 describing the actions of Antiochus Epiphanes against the Jews.
30 For ships of Kittim shall come against him, and he shall be afraid and withdraw, and shall turn back and be enraged and take action against the holy covenant. He shall turn back and pay attention to those who forsake the holy covenant.
So, that feeling of outrage that led Antiochus Epiphanes to slaughter the Jewish people and to set up the original abomination of desolation in the Temple? That’s the same word here. This is not a minor irritation. And added to that, the word translated as “sent him away” is ekballo, which is the same word used for expelling demons. So, the anger word back in verse 41 seems not as out of place as would make us feel comfortable to believe. We’re thinking, “This poor guy has a disease” and we keep getting slapped in the face with an angry Yeshua. And nothing in the text tells us the reason behind His anger. All we can do is guess, which we will do at the end of all this but not now.
44 and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”
This is important. For this, we go back to Leviticus 14 where we see that although the priests cannot heal biblical leprosy, they can declare someone clean if they are healed. In fact, they must declare the person clean so that he or she can be reintegrated into the community. Like the man in the synagogue and Peter’s mother in law, Yeshua keeps restoring people to wholeness and this isn’t just a health thing but a social reality. Restoring people to being in control of themselves in the case of the man with the demon in the synagogue, restoring Peter’s mother in law to health and service, and now restoring this man to the community. But first, first, he is commanded to be silent. Why? Well, as we have seen, once word gets out that a miracle worker is in town, no one cares about the preaching anymore. Their needs are too great and they become obsessed with freedom from demonic oppression, sickness, and disability. They are desperate for relief in a time when medicine couldn’t provide it, being largely based on superstition. Yeshua doesn’t want a following obsessed with relief but a following obsessed with the inauguration of the Kingdom of God and the message of salvation. Eternal salvation, not just the goodies that make life better. Not the prosperity Gospel but the Gospel that changes lives in a real and enduring way.
Now, the leper was clean, but he couldn’t re-enter society until he did what was required by God. Because, in the Torah, it is clear that to be a part of the community one also had to be a part of the worship community. Not perpetually clean all the time, as we talked about earlier, but ABLE to participate in the festivals as well as normal community life. Not being able to participate in the Passover especially would make one feel as though they weren’t even a child of Abraham. Shared experiences are so vital to our perception of ourselves, God, and others. So, first, he had to go to his local community and get inspected by a priest, who had some procedures and timetables to follow in order to declare him clean, and then, he had to go to Jerusalem in order to be officially reinstated to the community. There were three sacrifices to be performed and a washing. We’re not going to go into that—but what Yeshua told him to do, if he had done it immediately, would have taken enough time that Yeshua could have preached without hindrance before getting mobbed again by people desperate for healing. But, well, you know how folks are…
45 But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.
Now, it doesn’t say that He didn’t go to the priest first. It just doesn’t. So, we can’t assume that he didn’t go out and get declared clean and do his sacrifices at some point. We can’t. But what we do know is that he blabbed, and not just a little bit. It says he “went out” and the Greek word is very closely related to the word that describes the leprosy going out of him. Like, he went out from Yeshua the same exact way that the leprosy went out of him. That’s just alarming. It’s like trouble left him and he departed from Yeshua in the same way—as nothing but trouble.
Yeshua made it clear that He did not want the standard honoring that a patron in the ancient world would demand. That’s what used to happen, a greater person would grant a boon of some sort to a lesser person, be it financial or material or providing them with a position or whatever, and it was expected that the receiver would go out and return the favor by praising them and providing for them in return. That’s actually the concept behind “Freely you have received now freely give.” People in the ancient world were expected not to just take and take and take—they were required socially to give back. To refuse was beyond shameful. Sadly, modern people tend to read the Bible completely out of context and behave as though they are gluttons at a buffet and think nothing of giving back. The whole “that’s not what it means to me” mantra goes a whole lot deeper than we imagine. So, it is this guy’s culture that when someone does something good for you that you make them famous for doing it. You increase their honor. He wasn’t bragging that he had been healed, he was bragging about his healer. It was the right thing to do socially. He “talked freely” and beyond that, he “spread the news.” The consequence to Yeshua was that He could no longer enter any of the surrounding towns openly, meaning by day. He, again, was needing to be in eremos, desolate places outside the villages. People had to go out of their way to get to Him there. It also meant that if someone was in real need, someone else had to go to a lot of trouble to transport them to Him. It might seem heartless to us but remember that the message of the Kingdom brings real life—a better and more eternal life than mere healing. But if the people were crowding around Him for healing, there was no way to hear the Gospel of the Kingdom. Healing and miracles are wonderful, but they are nothing more than a side effect of the coming of the Kingdom.
So, what’s it for the main lesson for this week. I want to go back to the scholarly debate as to why Yeshua was angry because it is interesting to talk about. Of course, no one can know for sure and we have to always be understanding that although it is interesting to talk and debate and theorize, there are a lot of things that we just can’t know for sure and we have to be humble when discussing them. There are, of course, people who will say, “That word must be wrong, Yeshua would never be angry like that” but Yeshua is very complex and it is foolhardy of us to try and be more comfortable with Him. He doesn’t belong in our boxes. He also doesn’t fit into anything so small as our understanding. And those who try to get rid of orgizo also have to explain away the very definite anger in the words in verse 43.
So what do scholars have to say? Well, there are a few lines of thought and the first, of course, is that the orgizo was a scribal error and that the stern warning is just that, a stern warning. The second is that Yeshua is infuriated over the effect that leprosy has had on this man and his life and his body and that the anger is directed toward the disease and not the man at all. So, it isn’t very different from the first stance. The third assumes that Yeshua can see into the future and knows that the man is going to blab and is angry about that but is still overcome enough with compassion to heal him. The fourth is that Yeshua is actually angry with the man, that he is in fact a leper because of his terrible sin, and that because of this sin (which we will discuss in a minute here), Yeshua will be further prevented from ministering to others. But being Yeshua, He must heal the man as it is His nature and character even though it will cost Him dearly.
Now, we have four main cases of leprosy happening to named individuals in the Hebrew Scriptures. One is tied to speaking evil, otherwise known as evil tongue or lashon hara. That is the sin of Miriam and Aaron, and because Aaron was the high priest and could not be stricken with leprosy, it fell on Miriam after they spoke against Moses. Miriam was immediately made a leper by God and Moses interceded with her and she was healed but the whole nation had to halt their journeys while she went through her cleansing period. The second was King Uzziah, who dared to bring an incense offering into the Holy Place in the Temple when it was not right for anyone but the priests to do so. The Lord struck him with leprosy and he had to live separately for the rest of his life. That was the sin of ma’al—or encroachment. He got lucky. Uzzah touched the ark and he flat out died. Then we have Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, who sinned by taking a reward from Naaman the Syrian after he was healed by God of leprosy. Elisha refused any payment, but Gehazi went behind his back and got some goodies and, as a punishment, he was stricken with Naaman’s leprosy. In each case, the cause of leprosy was sin. This wasn’t just a contagious skin disease that an unfortunate person came down with. As I mentioned before, this sort of leprosy described in the Bible has no modern equivalent in description. As a result, however, anyone afflicted with any type of skin problem in certain circles is assumed to have sinned. This is unfortunate—and no, I am not talking about Jewish circles but Messianic circles. Sometimes, people come into a partial understanding of a new culture and they make unfortunate blanket judgments. I have heard people on more than one occasion claim that everyone with skin problems is a slanderer and a gossip. But if that is true, then it is a wonder why they themselves are not stricken as they are casting aspersions, without proof, on people with skin conditions. We have to be very careful that we are not ourselves becoming guilty of the sin we seek to expose. Biblical leprosy does not resemble any conditions out there today, so nothing we see out there right now meets the description of what happened to Miriam.
Lashon hara. Evil tongue. This is a tough one because no one sees themselves and their behavior being described by it. You might gossip, but when I do it, it’s just sharing concerns, right? Not so much? We’re in this society where gossip is rampant because of the internet. Every day on my social media news feed, I see gullible people just passing forward stories that they have no way of proving—and even when someone disproves them, they leave them up and they keep getting forwarded. Retractions aren’t that interesting, right? It’s like the Chasidic story about the rabbi and the feather pillow.
A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends. The rabbi told the man, “Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.” The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done it, the rabbi said, “Now, go and gather the feathers. Because you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the feathers.”
Speech has been compared to an arrow: once the words are released, like an arrow, they cannot be recalled, the harm they do cannot be stopped, and the harm they do cannot always be predicted, for words like arrows often go astray. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/speech-and-lashon-harah
I tell people this all the time when it comes to passing on stories. If you aren’t confident enough in the story to legitimately bet the lives of your children on it, then don’t pass it on. We absolutely need to be that sure of our accusations before spreading them around. There is a reason we are required, as per the Torah, to only listen to firsthand witnesses of good character who are not prone to causing mischief and spreading gossip. This isn’t a game, other people’s lives, and just because a person is famous doesn’t mean the penalty for false accusations will be less. We have to be very careful to follow Biblical, and not cultural, guidelines for when we should speak and when we should be silent.
[1] Arnold, C. E. (2002). Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke (Vol. 1, p. 217). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
