Craig Gaunt
Throughout the first five books of the Old Testament (commonly called the Pentateuch), There are several laws that seem straightforward to readers such as the Decalogue, treating the poor with dignity, and not worshipping any other god but the LORD. However, there are others that, unless one has a very expensive degree, it can be downright frustrating to understand the significance of it as well as how it applies to Christians today! If both Jews and Christians hold to the steadfast belief that God is not a god of confusion, then He certainly would not put in laws that had no reason or would be tedious or cumbersome to obey. For the Jew who reads the Law with the utmost observance, the passages in our discussion (Lev. 19:27-28; Deut. 14:1-2) are taken quite literally as being a part of the eternal and unchangeable covenant between God and Israel. Therefore, these Jews will not cut themselves at all, keep their beards and hair of their temples unshaven, and not allow themselves any tattoos. However, what of the Christian who had gotten a tattoo before they were converted? What of the believer who has to shave their head due to an infestation of lice? What happens to a Christian who feels guilty over struggling with self-mutilation and thinks that God will never forgive them? These questions can indeed be answered when the Scriptures are examined thoroughly.
One law that may seem confusing to most Christians is the forbidding of cutting oneself, shaving the front of one’s head, or tattooing oneself (Lev. 19:28; Deut. 14:1-2). This is especially tricky in the light of some modern day destructive habits including teenagers “cutting” themselves to deal with painful issues, shaving one’s head to belong to a club or gang, or the art of tattooing oneself over the entire body. In summary the reasoning of this law is the same as several other laws in the Torah that may seem foreign to us as Christians today: God wants His chosen people to not be like the rest of the world, and they are to be set apart so they can show a lost world His love and holiness. We as Christians need to take this more seriously in our culture today. While we may not be obligated to uphold the details of the law, the same principles behind these laws apply to us because God never changes.
Along these lines, Lev. 19:27-28 was meant to apply to all of Israel as it relates to pagan mourning practices involved in ancestor worship, and, along with divination, these were very prominent in cultures outside of Israel.[1] Deut. 14:1 further supports this with an injunction that because Israel’s people are children of one true God, they were to worship the living God rather than dead ancestors.[2] Milgrom goes on to treat the idea of cutting oneself with in depth study. He notes that slashing and gashing oneself was a practices of Baal worship, and it is present in Ugaritic texts.[3] In this literature, the god El slashes himself in mourning over the dead god Baal, and it may also have played a part in the ritual of the dying & rising god (Baal in Canaanite religion and Tammuz in Babylon).[4] Mesopotamian women would slash themselves as a sign of grief, and in the fertility cult of Baal, self-laceration was part of mourning for a deceased deity.[5] During the ceremony, the pain heightened the emotional ecstasy that the participant felt.[6] The historian Lucian reports that Galli Priests, inhabiting roughly near the area of Ugarit would slash their arms in worship and mourning.[7] One can even see this in the Bible in the story of Elijah versus the Baal priests on Mt. Carmel (1 Kings 18:28). Laceration as a mourning rite was universal in the ancient Near East as seen in several accounts including the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, etc.[8] The blood of an animal (or a human in some cases) were used to conjure up spirits for divination and instruction.[9] Even during the time of the prophets, laceration had become a common mourning practice in Israel (Jer. 16:6).
The Bible presents God as wanting to sharply distinguish between the worlds of the living and the dead, and self-laceration blurred these two worlds.[10] It tried to make the person appear dead so it would not stir to anger the ghost who was jealous of the living, and it blurred the lines between the realms of life and death.[11] The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary goes on to say, “The cutting of one’s body on behalf of a dead person (Lev. 17:28) presumably to appease the demons from tormenting the corpse when they say the blood shed.”[12] Some scholars think that a blood sacrifice from the living would strengthen the ghost of the dead person in the neither world, or to calm the ghost’s anger against the living by showing it how grieved the living were.[13] Practices like these were dedicated to underworld deities, and they offended God because, as stated earlier, He is the Lord of life and the living not the dead (Pss. 6:6; 88:6).[14] God wants to show His people that these other “deities” are nothing but dead idols and products of the fanciful yet depraved idea of men, and that He alone is the one true and living God.
When we read the forbidding of shaving the front of one’s head, there are several cultural factors we must first examine here as well. The length of a person’s hair and beard were a symbol of human vitality, as seen in Samson with an unshaven hair and beard (Judges 16).[15] The context is again dealing with a pagan mourning rite as seen later in Isaiah 15:2b where it speaks of the Moabites engaged in weeping and shaving the entire head.[16] Shaving one’s head for mourning is also referred in Lev. 21:5; Isa. 22:12; Mic. 1:16. On the other hand, natural baldness was believed to be either from hard work (Ezk. 29:18) or disease (Isa. 3:17, 24) in the minds of the biblical writers.[17] In other words, natural baldness was nothing to be ashamed of since it is out of a person’s control. However, removing all of your head hair by your own hands was forbidden. Shaving one’s head as a sacrifice to a deity was a common pagan practice in Canaan.[18] It was used in magic and rites involving the death of the god Osiris.[19] Locks of hair were even laid in tombs or funeral pyres in pre-Islamic Arabia and ancient Syria.[20]
An interesting contrast that Milgrom points out is the difference when it came to regarding the hair if you were an Israelite priest verses being laity. Lev. 19:27 and Deut. 14:1b are commands for all Israel, and it literally means that the side locks and front of the head are forbidden to shave while everywhere else is permissible for the laity as seen in Isa. 3:24 and Amos. 8:10, but it is only involved in mourning a lost loved one and nothing else.[21] These stipulations are the only way it could have divine approval. The priests, however, were strictly forbidden to shave anything on their heads (Lev. 21:5; Ezk. 44:20). The interesting priestly exception is Ezekiel who, at God’s divine command, shaved his head and beard, but this was to show Jews living in Babylonian exile a metaphor of judgment from God (Ezk. 5:1-5). Ideally, Letting the hair grow loose, or growing it, “signifies one’s indifference to one’s outward look; hence the need to be concerned with inner matters.”[22] The priests are commanded to let their beard grow (Lev. 21:5) so that there should be no outward difference between priests & lay people; rather it is about inner holiness.[23] Self-inflicted bald spots & gashing would profane those who are called to be holy, which includes the entire Israelite nation. Again in the way that the priests were to exemplify God to the Israelites, the entire Israelite community was, in turn, to show a holy God to an unholy world. Cutting oneself disfigures the divine creation, and it destroys the beautiful exterior of the human body which God has fashioned.
On the prohibiting of tattoos in Leviticus 19, the author found one basic similarity between then and now: the process is very similar and involves taking ink and injecting it under the skin to produce pigmentation.[24] Typically, it was the mark of slavery to either human or deity and is seen in the ancient Near East as well as Greece and Rome.[25] An example of this occurring in Scripture, although occurring much later in history than the Pentateuch, is seen in 3 Maccabees 2:21 when it speaks of a tattoo of an ivory leaf on the followers of Dionysus.[26] In ancient pagan religions, tattooing was meant to protect an individual against harmful magic from other gods by showing their allegiance to their own.[27]
The earliest evidence for this in the ancient Near East comes from Neolithic fertility figurines discovered in Jordan.[28] The middle-kingdom period in Egypt (2030-1640 B.C.) had tattoos representing Hathor, a fertility goddess that were found on the mummies of priestesses and on small figurines as well; these figurines linked sexuality with rebirth as guaranteeing resurrection of the dead.[29] Egypt’s new-kingdom period (1640-1070 B.C.) also had these tattoos depicting Bes, a god of childbirth and the home.[30] Not only in Egypt is this seen but also in Mesopotamia as temple slaves were tattooed or branded with the symbol of the temple to which they belonged.[31] Slaves would also be branded or tattooed with the symbol of the state to which they belonged if they were the king or Pharoh’s personal property, and they would have the branding or tattoo on their heads, hands, necks, and/or arms.[32]
This practice was strictly forbidden in Israelite culture because tattoos represented permanent slavery and the Israelites were to have no perpetual slaves unless the servant chose to remain (Lev. 25:39-46). Milgrom goes even so far as to say that, because Israelites were to keep no fellow Israelites as slaves, and that Israel is meant to be an example to the world, the abolition of slavery was the ultimate goal for the Israelite nation.[33] Indeed, God reminds His people often throughout the Torah not to mistreat their slaves because they were once slaves in Egypt, and God redeemed them. Plus, the mistreated slave’s prayers would reach the ears of the Lord, and He will rescue them. The prophet Isaiah even spoke of a time when the chosen of the Lord will write on their hands, “The LORD’S” because they will belong to no man but only to Him (Isa. 44:5). Rather than tattoos, the Israelite men wore phylacteries on his arm and forehead to show allegiance to God (Ex. 13:9, 16; Deut. 6:8, 11:8). Tattooing not only marred the divine creation just as much as shaving one’s head or slashing oneself, but when someone tattooed themselves (either then or today), it is almost as if they desire to show off their skin/soul to others and this should only be a privilege God has.[34]
Every one of these special commandments can be fitted in the framework that Deut. 14 sets in that this is a covenant between God and His people, and they are to be holy as He is holy. However, the language of the opening verses of this chapter portrays more that simple a king/conquered people-type relationship. It is saying that God is the Father who has ransomed His precious children from bondage, and they should act as He wants them too out of gratitude to Him and because He loves them. Although the Torah’s strict (and some would wrongly say “tedious”) list of practices to avoid may seem long and exhaustive to an outside reader, there is a reason why God commanded it to be this way, which was mentioned earlier. It is because He wants His people to not be like the rest of the world but take a stand and live differently for Him. This is one of the beautiful lessons that any Christian wanting to know how to apply the Law to their lives can take away from the reading of these verses. Second of all is this, not only does God regard His followers so highly that He does not want them to be like everyone else, but He personally fashioned each and every individual human being. Because God creates great masterpieces, every human being is no less than a work of art. God does not desire that anyone inflict pain or scar that masterpiece in the name of anyone or anything else. Shaving one’s head, cutting oneself, or tattooing one’s body when the intentions are not right in God’s eyes is the equivalent of pointing a finger at Him and saying, “why did you make me the way you did, I do not like it and cannot stand it so I am going to change it to make it better where you failed!” This does nothing less than break the heart of God who wants His children to realize that He loves them just the way they are because it was by His hands He fashioned them. Altering one’s body in the name of something other than God is nothing less than spiritual idolatry.
[1] Gane, Roy, NIV Application Commentary: Leviticus-Numbers. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004 pg. 340
[2] Milgrom, Jacob, Anchor Bible Commentary: Leviticus: a new translation with introduction and commentary. Vol. 3a, New York: Doubleday, c1991-2001 pg. 1691
[3] Ibid, pg. 1692
[4] McConville, J.G., Apollos Old Testament Commentary Vol. 5: Deuteronomy. Leicester, England: Apollos, 2002 pg. 248
[5] Arch Study Bible, 2005 Study Notes pg. 180
[6] Bailey, Lloyd R. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary: Leviticus-Numbers. Macon, Ga: Smyth & Helwys Pub. 2005 pg. 235
[7] Milgrom, Anchor Bible Commentary pg. 1693
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kleinig, John W. Concordia Commentary: Leviticus. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Pub. House, c2003 pg. 415-416
[10] Ibid.
[11] Milgrom, Jacob, A Continental Commentary: Leviticus: A Book of Ritual & Ethics. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, c2004 pg. 242
[12] The New Interpreter’s Bible: general articles & introduction, commentary, & reflections for each book of the Bible, including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books. Vol. 1 Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994-2002 pg. 1135
[13] Tigay, Jeffrey Jewish Publication Society Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy. 1 ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996 pg. 136
[14] Milgrom Anchor Bible Commentary pg. 1694
[15] Bailey, pg. 234
[16] Ibid., pg. 1690
[17] Arch Study Bible, pg. 273
[18] Ibid.
[19] Bailey, pg. 234
[20] Milgrom, A Continental Commentary pg. 241
[21] Milgrom, Anchor Bible Commentary pg. 1690
[22] Kiuchi, Nobuyoshi, Apollos Old Testament Commentary Vol. 5: Leviticus, Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic 2007 pg. 358
[23] Ibid.
[24] Encyclopaedia Judaica / Fred Skolnik, editor-in-chief 2nd ed. Vol. 19 pg. 526
[25] Ibid.
[26] The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary pg. 1135
[27] Arch Study Bible, pg. 180
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Milgrom, Anchor Bible Commentary pg. 1694
[33] Ibid., pg. 1695
[34] Kiuchi, pg. 358
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