law. The medical details, the distinction between one kind of leprosy and another, as between the white (Aɛuký), which among the Jews was the most frequent, and the yet more terrible elephantiasis (thought by many to have been that with which Job was visited, and so named because in it the feet swelled to an elephantine size), would be here out of place. Only it will be necessary to correct a mistake, common to all writers who, like Michaëlis, can see in the Levitical ordinances little more, for the most part, than regulations of police or of a Board of health, or, at the highest, rules for the well ordering of an earthly society; thus missing altogether a main purpose which these ordinances hadnamely, that by them men might be trained into a sense of the cleaving taint which is theirs from birth, into a confession of impurity and of consequent separation from God, and thus into a longing after purity and re-union with Him. I refer to the mistaken assumption that leprosy was catching from one person to another; and that lepers were so carefully secluded from their fellow-men, lest they might communicate the poison of the disease to others; as, in like manner, that the torn garment, the covered lip, the cry Unclean, unclean' (Lev. xiii. 45), were warnings to all that they should keep aloof, lest unawares touching a leper, or drawing into too great a nearness, they should become partakers of his disease. So far from any danger of the kind existing, nearly all who have looked closest into the matter agree that the sickness was incommunicable by ordinary contact from one person to another. A leper might transmit it to his children,' or the mother of a leper's children might take it from him; but it was by no ordinary contact communicable from one person to another.

All the notices in the Old Testament, as well as in other Jewish books, confirm the statement that we have here something very much higher than a mere sanitary regulation.

1 See Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 359.

Thus, where the law of Moses was not observed, no such exclusion necessarily found place; Naaman the leper commanded the armies of Syria (2 Kin. v. 1); Gehazi, with his leprosy that never should be cleansed (2 Kin. v. 27), talked familiarly with the king of apostate Israel (2 Kin. viii. 5). And even where the law of Moses was in force, the stranger and the sojourner were expressly exempted from the ordinances relating to leprosy; which could not have been, had the disease been contagious, and the motives of the leper's exclusion been not religious, but civil.' How, moreover, should the Levitical priests, had the disease been this creeping infection, have ever themselves escaped it, obliged as they were by their very office to submit the leper to actual handling and closest examination? Lightfoot can only explain this by supposing in their case a perpetual miracle.

But there is no need of this. The ordinances concerning leprosy had another and far deeper significance, into which it will be needful a little to enter. It is clear that the same principle which made all having to do with death, as mourning (Lev. xxi. 1; Ezek. xliv. 25), a grave (Luke xi. 44; Matt. xxiii. 27), a corpse, the bones of a dead man (Ezek. xxxix. 12-15; 2 Kin. xxiii. 20), the occasions of a ceremonial uncleanness, inasmuch as all these were signs and consequences of sin, might consistently with this have made

1 See a learned dissertation by Rhenferd, De Leprá Cutis Hebræorum, in Meuschen, Nov. Test. ex Talm. illust. pp. 1086-1089; who concludes his disquisition on this part of the subject thus: Ex quibus, nisi nos omnia fallunt, certe concludimus, præcipuis Judæorum magistris, traditionumque auctoribus nunquam in mentem incidisse ullam de lepræ contagio suspicionem, omnemque hanc de contagiosâ leprâ sententiam plurimis antiquissimisque scriptoribus æque ac Mosi plane fuisse incognitam. Compare the extract from Balsamon, in Suicer, Thes. s. v. Ampoc, where, speaking of the custom of the Eastern Church, he says, "They frequent our churches and eat with us, in nothing hindered by the disease.' In like manner there was a place for them, though a place apart, in the synagogues.-I ought to add that Dr. Belcher, in a very learned essay in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, May 1864, with the title The Hebrew, Medieval and Modern Leprosies Compared, does not consider that Rhenferd has proved his point.

every sickness an occasion of uncleanness, each of these being also death beginning, partial death-echoes in the body of that terrible reality, sin in the soul. But instead of this, in a gracious sparing of man, and not pushing the principle to the uttermost, God took but one sickness, one of these visible outcomings of a tainted nature, in which to testify that evil was not from Him, could not dwell with Him. He linked this teaching but with one; by his laws concerning it to train men into a sense of a clinging impurity, which needed a Pure and a Purifier to overcome and expel, and which nothing short of his taking of our flesh could drive out. And leprosy, the sickness of sicknesses, was throughout these Levitical ordinances selected of God from the whole host of maladies and diseases which had broken in upon the bodies of men. Bearing his testimony against it, He bore his testimony against that out of which every sickness grows, against sin; as not from Him, as grievous in his sight; and against the sickness also itself as grievous, being as it was a visible manifestation, a direct consequence, of sin, a forerunner of that death, which by the portal of disobedience and revolt had found entrance into natures created by Him for immortality.

And fearful indeed, as might be expected, was that disease, round which this solemn teaching revolved. Leprosy was nothing short of a living death, a corrupting of all the humours, a poisoning of the very springs, of life; a dissolution little by little of the whole body, so that one limb after another actually decayed and fell away. Aaron exactly describes the appearance which the leper presented to the eyes of the beholders, when, pleading for Miriam, he says, 'Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed when he cometh out of his mother's womb' (Num. xii. 12). The disease, moreover, was incurable by the art and skill of man; not that the leper might not return to health; for,

1 Cyril of Alexandria calls it wábog ovк iáciμov. Dr. Thomson (The Land and the Book, pt. iv. c. 43) has a terrible account of this disease.

however rare, such cases are contemplated in the Levitical law. But then the leprosy left the man, not in obedience to any skill of the physician, but purely and merely through the good will and mercy of God. This helplessness of man in the matter dictates the speech of Jehoram, who, when Naaman is sent to claim healing from him, exclaims, Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy?' (2 Kin. v. 7); as though the king of Syria had been seeking to fasten a quarrel upon him.

The leper, thus fearfully bearing about in the body the outward and visible tokens of sin in the soul, was treated throughout as a sinner, as one in whom sin had reached its climax, as one dead in trespasses and sins. He was himself a dreadful parable of death. He bore about him the emblems of death (Lev. xiii. 45); the rent garments, mourning for himself as one dead; the head bare, as they were wont to have it who were defiled by communion with the dead (Num. vi. 9; Ezek. xxiv. 17); and the lip covered (Ezek. xxiv. 17'). In the restoration, too, of a leper, precisely the same instruments of cleansing were in use, the cedar-wood, the hyssop, and scarlet, as were used for the cleansing of one defiled through a dead body, or aught pertaining to death; these same being never employed on any other occasion (cf. Num. xix. 6, 13, 18 with Lev. xiv. 4-7). When David exclaims, Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean' (Ps. li. 7), he looking through the outward to the inward, even to the true blood of sprinkling, contemplates himself as a spiritual leper, one who had sinned a sin unto death, needing therefore to be restored to God from the very furthest degree of separation from Him. And being this sign and token of sin, and of sin reaching to and culminating

1 Spencer calls him well, sepulcrum ambulans; and Calvin: Pro mortuis habiti sunt, quos lepra a sacro cætu abdicabat. And when through the Crusades leprosy had been introduced into Western Europe, it was usual to clothe the leper in a shroud, and to say for him the masses for the dead.

in death, it naturally brought about with it a total exclusion from the camp or city of God. God is not a God of the dead; He has no fellowship with death, for death is the correlative of sin; but only of the living. But the leper was as one dead, and as such was shut out of the camp' (Lev. xiii. 46; Num. v. 2-4) and the city (2 Kin. vii. 3), this law being so strictly enforced, that even the sister of Moses might not be exempted from it (Num. xii. 14, 15); and kings themselves, as Uzziah (2 Chron. xxvi. 21; 2 Kin. xv. 5), must submit to it; men being by this exclusion taught that what here took place in a figure, should take place in the reality with every one who was found in the death of sin: he should be shut out of the true City of God. Thus, taking up and glorifying this and like ordinances of exclusion, St. John declares of the New Jerusalem, There shall nowise enter into it anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie' (Rev. xxi. 27).

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2

Nothing of all this, as need hardly be observed, in the least implied that the leper was a worse or guiltier man than his fellows; though being, as it was, this symbol of sin, it was most often the theocratic punishment, the penalty for offences committed against the theocracy, that, for instance, of Miriam, of Gehazi, of Uzziah; compare Deut. xxiv. 8, where the warning, 'Take heed of the plague of leprosy,' is no admonition diligently to observe the laws about leprosy, but to have a care lest any disobedience of theirs should provoke God to visit them with this plague.3 The Jews themselves called it the finger of God,' and emphatically, the stroke.' It attacked, they said, first a man's house; and then, if he refused to turn, his clothing; and lastly, should

1 Herodotus (i. 138) mentions the same law of exclusion as existing among the Persians, who accounted in like manner that leprosy was an especial visitation on account of especial sins.

* The strange apocryphal tradition of Judas Iscariot perishing by the long misery of a leprosy, in its most horrible form of elephantiasis, had this same origin (Gfrörer, Die heilige Sage, vol. i. p. 179).

3 See Rhenferd, p. 1082.