I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before, but the version that I use for my Coffee and a Bible blog is the New American Standard version. It’s been my preaching and study Bible for the last 20 years, so its phrasing is engrained within me at this point.
That being said, I find myself often looking to other translations to see just what exactly I’m looking at. Leviticus 11:29-30 is a perfect example. The list of eight “crawling things” that are unclean, in the NASB, consist of moles, mice, geckos, chameleons, “sand reptiles,” great lizards, regular lizards and crocodiles.
Immediately, that brings to mind certain types of animals—both big and small. But other translations use different words, such as substituting weasel for mole (NIV), the snail for “sand lizard” (KJV), and the ferret for the gecko (Webster’s Bible Translation).
This leads me to conclude two things. First, I don’t think that I’ll ever know exactly what the animals are in these two verses (although I think I have a general idea).
But secondly, the laser-specific type of animal doesn’t really matter. The meaning is clear regardless. These animals are certainly unclean, but because of their size, they also present another, more practical danger to the Israelites: They could crawl into your Tupperware and die.
In a home environment as “open concept” as ancient Israelite tents, it was probably a relatively common occurrence to open up your pantry and find a dead lizard hiding in your pots and pans. And since animal carcasses are considered unclean, how are you supposed to fix the situation?
According to Leviticus 11:32-38, you smash the bowl into pieces. Because of the dead animal, not only is that vessel now ritually unclean to you, but it also could pass on germs through to your food.
There are other stipulations as well. If there is water in a drinking vessel that comes into contact with a dead carcass, that water is unclean (the same applies for food). Seed that you’ll eventually put in the ground is still clean, but an oven that is used for cooking is unclean. Clothing is clean as long as it soaks in water for a full day.
Some might argue that this all seems excessive, but to me, it kinda makes sense. They didn’t have the cleaning supplies that we do, so they couldn’t just scrub the bacteria away. The entire thing needed to be destroyed so as to keep the food and the person clean.
