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Leviticus 14 follows ancient Near Eastern ritual practices also seen in the Emar Saharsubbu tablet, which describes very similar rites after recovery from skin disease, demonstrating a distinct familiarity with those priestly traditions.
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Emar Saharsubbu
Saharšubbû
Ancient Near East
If a person has saharsubbu and there is white color on his body, you should take asagu-plant, salt, barley, flour, and anoint him and he will get well ... Likewise if the saharsubbu is yellow and red ... ... The leprosy is yellow and red, it is the hand of Sin. To remove it, you should anoint him with human semen for seven days and he will recover ... ... After he recovers, this patient stands before Shamash. You shall burn one partridge and a crab before Shamash, and with another partridge you shall wipe his body and he will let it go.
Date: 1200 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Leviticus 14:3
Hebrew Bible
1 The Lord spoke to Moses: 2 “This is the law of the diseased person on the day of his purification, when he is brought to the priest. 3 The priest is to go outside the camp and examine the infection. If the infection of the diseased person has been healed, 4 then the priest will command that two live clean birds, a piece of cedar wood, a scrap of crimson fabric, and some twigs of hyssop be taken up for the one being cleansed. 5 The priest will then command that one bird be slaughtered into a clay vessel over fresh water. 6 Then he is to take the live bird along with the piece of cedar wood, the scrap of crimson fabric, and the twigs of hyssop, and he is to dip them and the live bird in the blood of the bird slaughtered over the fresh water, 7 and sprinkle it seven times on the one being cleansed from the disease, pronounce him clean, and send the live bird away over the open countryside.
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Notes and References
"... The comprehensive similarity between the two texts makes the absence of a corresponding healing rite in Leviticus 14 highly significant. Hence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that similar healing rites were known to the Israelite priesthood but that they were deliberately omitted. (The Emar tablet is itself representative of this cross-cultural ritual koiné, with links to Mesopotamian, Hittite and Ugaritic traditions) As a result, this comparison brings into sharp relief the fact that the rites preserved in Leviticus 13–14 have been carefully selected from a larger body of ritual traditions to which the priests and the Israelite population in general were privy ..."
Feder, Yitzhaq
Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor
(p. 80) Cambridge University Press, 2022
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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