🔢WEB · Numbers 5:2
What does Numbers 5:2 mean?
"“Command the children of Israel that they put out of the camp every leper, and everyone who has an issue, and whoever is unclean by the dead."
— Numbers 5:2 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,
“Command the children of Israel that they put out of the camp every leper, and everyone who has an issue, and whoever is unclean by the dead.
Both you shall put male and female outside of the camp; that they not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell.”
The children of Israel did so, and put them outside of the camp; as Yahweh spoke to Moses, so did the children of Israel.
Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,
Explanation
Numbers 5:2 records God's instruction to Moses that the Israelites remove three categories of people from their camp: those with leprosy (a term covering various skin diseases, not limited to what we now call Hansen's disease), those with a bodily discharge or issue, and those made unclean through contact with a dead body. The verse itself is a command God gives, which Moses is to relay to the people, and the following verses clarify that both men and women in these conditions were to be sent outside the camp until they were restored to a state of ceremonial cleanness.
To understand the context, remember that Israel at this point was a camp of former slaves recently freed from Egypt, organized in the wilderness around the tabernacle, the tent where God's presence dwelt among them. The tribes were arranged in a specific formation surrounding this tent, and the arrangement itself testified that a holy God lived in their midst. Numbers, as a book, deals extensively with organizing the camp, its worship, and its purity, because the presence of a holy God among an imperfect people required careful attention to what was clean and unclean. Leviticus 13-15 had already laid out detailed instructions on skin diseases, bodily discharges, and corpse contamination; Numbers 5 now applies those laws practically by commanding that affected individuals be removed from the camp itself.
Theologically, this verse expresses the seriousness of God's holiness and the necessity of maintaining a clean space for his presence. Skin diseases, discharges, and death all pictured decay, corruption, and mortality — realities incompatible with the w
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