This is the Bible Book Club where each episode we dive deep into the only book

book written 2,000 years ago that can still change your life today.

Welcome to the club!

Last time was chapter 11. And in that chapter, if you've not listened to the last episode,

I want to give you a little heads up, everything we're about to talk about in this episode is very closely tied to it.

So in case you're out of order, you probably want to go back because you might be a little bit confused if you didn't listen to episode six. So, but now we're in episode seven, but back in episode six,

we were doing purity in law school. I'm purity law school. I don't know why I wanted to go to law

school once, but now I'm in it. We're no longer in ritual law. Yes. And we were reading the laws for ritual purity. The first thing we learned is that purity is not always what you think. It is most often not even a sin, but unclean naturally occurring conditions that just require a cleansing by washing in ceremonial ritual. An example would be accidentally touching a carcass of an

unclean animal. The concept of pursuing purity set Israel apart from the other nations as they

sought to be as holy as God is holy through purity. So in chapter 11 we read and discussed the first

laws for purity which pertain to animals. Which animals are clean, which animals are

unclean, which ones you can eat, which ones you can touch, and which you can't correct.

Moving on from animals in this episode, all the remaining ritual purity laws are for people.

So the law starts with the human conditions that render a person unclean for the longest period of time, which are the purity laws for childbirth in chapter 12.

Yeah. And before I read this, I just want to point out one of my Bible benders from last episode was how you pointed out, Susan, that this is being given to the Israelites in the order of

which God created the world. First, he created the animals, then he created the people,

and he first gave them the rules for the animals. Now he's given rules for the people. Correct.

Love it. Chapter 12, The Lord said to Moses, say to the Israelites, a woman who becomes pregnant

and gives birth to a son

will be ceremonially uncleaned for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period.

On the eighth day, the boy is to be circumcised. Then the woman must wait 33 days to be purified

from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her

...