When it comes to leprosy, the stakes are high. Not only does an outbreak result in a vastly diminished physical lifestyle (if not death), it also makes you an outcast from your community. Loneliness, depression, pain, death—it’s all on the table when leprosy rears its ugly head.
Add to that the incurable nature of the disease. Although great strides have been made in the last few centuries to treat people with leprosy, historically speaking, if you were afflicted, you didn’t recover—at least not completely. In the eyes of most ancient people, only God could heal you.
This reality makes those seven days from quarantine to re-examination all the more important. Once you were removed from society, you waited patiently to see what would happen. Would the leprosy go away, or would it continue to spread and ravage your body? Only time would tell.
But how often did leprosy heal itself? How common was it for lepers to actually recover from a disease that so many viewed as unrecoverable?
As it turns out, the rate is pretty high. Although medical records from Old Testament times are obviously scarce, there have been a few recently that showed the rate of recovery can be as 70%, without medical intervention.
Moreover, it’s thought that as high as 95% of the population may be immune from leprosy altogether. So even if you were to somehow come into contact with the disease, it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence.
Of course, all of this is relatively insignificant to someone who is actively suffering from leprosy. While you can hold out hope that person will recover—and that hope seems to be well founded—it’s far from a sure thing.
Jesus makes an interesting comment about being healed from leprosy in Luke 4:27. There, as He’s telling the citizens of Nazareth about how “no prophet is without honor in their hometown,” He brings up Naaman from 2 Kings 5. In those days, there were a lot of lepers in Israel during Elisha’s time, but only Naaman was cleansed. Naaman’s story highlights the theme of divine favor and grace, emphasizing that God’s blessings are not limited to those within the boundaries of Israel. This is particularly poignant when considering the law of leprosy in Leviticus, which outlines strict regulations for purification and social exclusion. Through Naaman’s cleansing, Jesus illustrates that even those who are outsiders can be recipients of God’s mercy and healing.
Does that mean that he was the only one healed miraculously, or does that mean he was the only one healed at all? My money is on the former; surely other lepers were healed, just not miraculously.
Regardless, the teaching of the passage indicates that healing could have happened miraculously, but it was the faithlessness of Israel made it so that a non-Israelite was the only one who received a cleansing.
The same happened with Miriam in Numbers 12 who dared to challenge his authority. Moses had to intervene directly to God for his sister to be healed, and God responded.
It may be difficult to think of living in a time where an incurable disease like leprosy was always a possibility, but we all live with threats of our own. Cancer is terrifying, and even though we have tools to help fight these battles, the danger is still always there.
The first thing we should do when contracting these maladies is go to our knees in prayer, begging God for His mercy and care. I imagine lepers spent those first seven days in isolation doing the exact same thing.
