Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

We've been in the wilderness with the Israelites for a little over a year, and so far we've made a

covenant, established the laws of that covenant, built a tabernacle, arranged an encampment around

that tabernacle, and assigned roles to the Levites in the surface of the tabernacle.

Today, God addressed the rest of the tribes as well, making sure they were living the set-apart

lives of purity and holiness that he called them to when he entered into his covenant with

them. Today, when he's dealing with

impurity, God starts with the most obvious kind, external impurity. He orders them to put the people

with skin diseases outside of the camp, along with anyone who's come in contact with a dead body.

As a reminder, this doesn't mean they're kicked out of his people or that they're homeless. They just

have to be quarantined so they don't defile the tabernacle. Next, God moves on to addressing internal

impurity, sins committed against God or others. God calls for confession and repentance, as well as

legal restitution according to the laws he gave Moses. If the person someone was supposed to pay

back was dead or had no family, the restitution went to the laws he gave Moses. If the person someone was supposed to pay back was dead or had no

family, the restitution went to the priest. Then we had a really challenging part of this

section, and it's challenging for a few reasons. The section on adultery or suspected adultery is

ultimately a call for marital purity. If anyone defiles that, male or female, the penalty was death in their society,

according to Deuteronomy 22. But what we encountered today was a different thing. It was how to

handle the suspicion of adultery. They needed a way to address this because it's likely that people

aren't going to just confess this outright like God commanded them to do with their sins,

people are going to be more tight-lipped about this because of the fact that this sin gets the death penalty. So we have a scenario here where a man is suspicious that his wife has cheated with another

man. And as for why the woman is the one held to account here, there are a few reasons this could

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