Spitting in a Dixie Cup and Understanding Leviticus

If you are asked to spit in a Dixie cup and drink it, you’d think that was gross or unclean. But what’s so different about the saliva in your mouth and your own saliva in a cup? Why is the former clean/natural and the latter unclean/gross? Such examples, along with others in this video, give us a better understanding of the categories of clean/unclean or pure/impure in Leviticus. This ritual background then sheds light on the narratives in Mark 5, when Jesus comes face-to-face with two situations of ritual uncleanness, one involving menstrual blood and one involving a corpse. Grasping the Hebrew mindset about impurity will deepen our understanding of the implications of Jesus coming into direct “contagious” contact with uncleanness. In this week’s video on “Reading the Gospels through Hebrew Eyes,” Chad Bird will guide us through Mark 5:21-43.