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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, January 14, 1868

REASONS FOR DISCARDING FLESH.

CHAP. XI, 8. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch; they are unclean unto you.

A very learned physician, Hebenstreit, thinks the great utility of these laws was the preservation by them of the public health. Palestine being exposed to the hot winds of the sandy Arabian deserts, a stricter diet was requisite, and unless cooler winds from the Mediterranean Sea had tempered the air, nowhere would inflammatory and putrid diseases more prevail. Judea, it is true, like similar hot countries, abounded in fruits producing a pleasant acid, which resisted the putrefying tendency of the humors. But these could not avert all danger, unless the most wholesome animal flesh alone, were used for food; and we cannot sufficiently admire the wisdom of the legislator who interdicted the Israelites those kinds of food, which soonest corrupt. All blood is digested in the stomach with difficulty, as it coagulates into grains difficult of solution, and very soon becomes putrid; whence, in strangled animals, the flesh distended with blood, is wont quickly to corrupt. The abuse of fat meats is always prejudicial to health, for it weakens the powers of the stomach, hinders digestion, and induces (ranorem,) the source and fuel of the most difficult bilious and putrid diseases. Most of the animals forbidden to the Israelites, seek their food in filth and dirt, or live by the destruction of other animals; hence their humors easily tend to putrefaction.—Rosenmuller.

BURNING INFECTED CLOTHING.

CHAP. XIII, 52. He shall therefore burn that garment, whether warp or woof, in woollen or in linen, or any thing of skin, wherein the plague is: for it is a fretting leprosy; it shall be burnt in the fire.

Michaelis was told by a dealer in wool, that the wool of sheep which die of disease, if it had not been shorn from the animal while living, is unfit to make cloth, and liable to something like what Moses here describes. Dr. A. Clarke, however, thinks the fretting is occasioned by the breeding of animalculæ, or vermin (who thus like moths corrode the cloth for nourishment), burrowing in the skin, which we know to be the cause of the psora or itch, which will, through garments, communicate infection after six or seven years even. The scarlet fever, plague, &c., are also communicated by garments, old rags, &c., hence Moses commands such things to be burnt. See Michaelis and Clarke.