Leviticus 5:2-3

INVOLUNTARY VIOLATION OF CEREMONIAL PURITY, Leviticus 5:2-3.

2. If a soul touch The soul is here put for the entire man.

Any unclean thing It is difficult for those who have not been ceremonially trained from infancy to group together things differing so widely as the moral turpitude just mentioned and the accidental and innocent contact with a dead mouse or snail, (Leviticus 11:23-43;) yet in the religious development and discipline of the Hebrews there was a perpetual commingling of offences, arbitrary, factitious, and temporal, with immutable and eternal moral principles. It is not for us to deny that this period of ceremonial pupilage was necessary. Things which would be unsuited to the Gospel dispensation, and even ridiculous in contrast with its spiritual sublimities, have their proper place in a law of temporal sanctions, chiefly or solely affecting the present life only.

Shall be unclean He was cut off for the time from certain religious and social privileges, and his citizenship in Israel was in abeyance. From these disadvantages, certain ritualistic acts alone could free him. These were not required in order to magnify the office of the priest, but to impress upon the people a sense of the personality and holiness of God, and of the reality of his covenant. In shadow they suggested the necessity of a spiritual cleansing from moral pollution.

Guilty The verb asham here expresses a different idea from the iniquity committed by the silent witness of wrong. It signifies primarily to be desert, to lie waste; hence, as applied to man, to fail in duty.