Bible Discussion Thread

help me understand Leviticus 19th chapter - 28th verse - today is july 2nd 2020

Benjiman, as you know, the books of Exodus & Leviticus contain a huge amount of laws pertaining to every area of an Israelite's life, religious, social & personal. They were to march into the Promised Land, a land filled with heathen idol worshippers. They were to conquer the land that the Lord had given them, possess it, but not to become a part of their evil lifestyle. So many of these instructions given to them, had implications as to their behaviour given that it would be easy to conform to foreign patterns, sometimes unknowingly.

The Scripture you cite, is a part of that warning: not to cut the flesh for the dead & not to print marks on the body. Other warnings about special cuttings of the beard & head of hair, eating food with blood, prostitution & wizardry, were some other aspects of heathen life that were to be shunned.

Some heathens practised cutting of the flesh for the dead in response to the soul's departure, whether as a mark of respect or some type of propitiatory offering to a deity for the soul's destiny. And the marking of the body is similar to the tatoos of today, but not for the same purpose. Again, it was probably done as a religious exercise, in memory of a deity or of some superstition. Any voluntary cutting or disfigurement of a human body was (& is) an outrage to God's workmanship & was intolerable at that time. Sadly, it is now fashionable, to which believers sometimes succumb.