Midweek Meeting Wednesday March 14 2018

We were back to full strength last Wednesday and we had a visitor too who is thinking of joining us in the near futre. Encouraging. Before we prayed we looked again at Leviticus 23 and at the Spring festivals in ancient Israel - Passover and Pentecost, basically. It was good to bring the New Testament data to bear on these verses. I am sorry I don't have a clearer grasp of the Jewish feasts. Hopefully this run through Leviticus 23 will help.

Midweek Meeting Wednesday January 24 2018

We went back to Leviticus last night. We had broken off near the end of last year at verse 18 of Chapter 19. I hoped to finish the chapter last night but I felt I needed to recap on approach adn so in the end we only did verses 19-28. It confirmed to me again the usefulness of the threefold division of the law as a hermeneutical tool. Not that all difficulties then disappear but at least one can see ways to apply the equity of laws that have clearly now passed. I wasn't too long adn we had plenty of time for prayer and all present prayed. Glad to be back in Leviticus.

Like snow

I'm around halfway through Philip Eveson's commentary on Leviticus now. this paragraph on p 175 let in some shafts of light.

If the skin condition has covered the whole body and left the skin white all over, then the priest can pronounce the person clean (13:12-13). This has caused headaches to many people because they have understood ‘white’ to signify a leprous condition. The confusion has been caused by translators adding ‘white as’ when the word ‘snow’ is used of leprosy in Numbers 12:12 and 2 Kings 5:27. But the colour ‘white’ is not found in the original text of these verses. Sufferers from bad dandruff, when they comb their hair, find particles of dry skin on their clothes like flakes of snow. That is the point of the comparison. Both Miriam and Gehazi were leprous ‘like snow’, not in the sense that their skin became ‘white like snow’, but that it became ‘flaky like snow’. One of the two miraculous signs that God gave Moses was that his hand became leprous ‘like snow’, in the sense of ‘flaky like snow’, and then was restored again like the rest of his skin (Exod. 4:6-7).
The whiteness of the skin in the present passage is therefore not a sign of leprosy but of clean skin after a leprous skin disorder. It is like new white skin after scabs have peeled off.