These days, as the coronavirus continues to ravage the world, infecting hundreds of thousands and killing tens of thousands, we are hearing a lot about quarantine. Quarantine is an isolation of people from the larger population that is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pestilence. Typically, quarantine is used to isolate those who have been exposed, or might have been exposed, to a communicable disease, but do not yet have a confirmed medical diagnosis.
You’ll have noticed that the word quarantine includes the Latin root “four” (e.g., quarter, quart, etc.). That is because the term originates from quarantena, which means "forty days." In the mid-Fourteenth Century, the Bubonic Plague, also called the “Black Death,” killed about a third of Europe's people. Like the coronavirus, the Black Death originated in East Asia, and was brought to the Crimea probably by the “silk road” trading route. From there it was transported to the Mediterranean and southern Europe by merchant ships from Genoa and other maritime city-states such as Venice. One of these city-states, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) adopted a rule that newcomers had to spend 30 days on a nearby island waiting to see whether the symptoms of Black Death would develop. Across the Adriatic, the Venetian Senate adopted an even longer waiting period of 40 days, and it is from the Venetian language that the word quarantena comes. According to current estimates, the Plague went from initial infection to death in 37 days, so a 40-day period of isolation would have been very effective in exposing it.
I was prompted to write this article when, about a month ago, I looked up quarantine in Wikipedia, and their article asserted that the first use of quarantine was in 8th Century Syria under Caliph Al-Walid I, who ordered that lepers be isolated from other patients in his hospital in Damascus. I knew this was not the first use of quarantine, since the concept of quarantine appears in the Bible. In writing this article, I re-visited the Wikipedia article and discovered that it had been updated to include the passage in Leviticus that prescribes quarantine. (I’m guessing that article is getting a lot of page hits these days, and someone noticed the absurd mistake and corrected.)
Leviticus 13 provides a protocol for dealing with skin conditions that may be infectious diseases. As with the laws on clean and unclean animals, this protocol related to ceremonial uncleanness, but in retrospect we understand it as directed more toward public health and safety than to what we think of as religion or spirituality.
God spoke to Moses and Aaron: “When someone has a swelling or a blister or a shiny spot on the skin that might signal a serious skin disease on the body, bring him to Aaron the priest or to one of his priest sons. The priest will examine the sore on the skin. If the hair in the sore has turned white and the sore appears more than skin deep, it is a serious skin disease and infectious. After the priest has examined it, he will pronounce the person unclean.
“If the shiny spot on the skin is white but appears to be only on the surface and the hair has not turned white, the priest will quarantine the person for seven days. On the seventh day the priest will examine it again; if, in his judgment, the sore is the same and has not spread, the priest will keep him in quarantine for another seven days. On the seventh day the priest will examine him a second time; if the sore has faded and hasn’t spread, the priest will declare him clean—it is a harmless rash. The person can go home and wash his clothes; he is clean. But if the sore spreads after he has shown himself to the priest and been declared clean, he must come back again to the priest who will conduct another examination. If the sore has spread, the priest will pronounce him unclean—it is a serious skin disease and infectious. Lev. 13:1-8. (The Message, MSG).
If, after the 7 (or 14)-day period, the person was found to have an infectious disease, he was barred from participating in the tabernacle rituals and, more importantly from a modern public health perspective, he had to live outside the camp:
God spoke to Moses: “Command the People of Israel to ban from the camp anyone who has an infectious skin disease, anyone who has a discharge, and anyone who is ritually unclean from contact with a dead body. Ban male and female alike; send them outside the camp so that they won’t defile their camp, the place I live among them. Num. 5:1-3 (MSG)
Further in Leviticus 13, we see that the same protocol applies sores, boils, burns and other skin conditions that might have become infected and might spread to others.
There is also a protocol for isolating and destroying cloth or leather clothing that might have become contaminated with mold or fungus; if the mold cannot be washed out, the garment must be burned. (Lev. 13:47-59). This is remarkably helpful information, given what we now know about “toxic mold” and mycotoxins that can cause neurological damage and even death.
The people were also to isolate anyone with an unusual bodily discharge that might be a symptom of an infectious disease. The person having the discharge was unclean, and anything he touched was also unclean. The law promoted basic sanitation, such as handwashing, washing clothes, and bathing, for anyone who had come into contact with an unclean person, or with some item the unclean person had touched:
“Any bed the man with a discharge lies on will be unclean, and anything he sits on will be unclean. Anyone who touches his bed must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Whoever sits on anything that the man with a discharge sat on must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Whoever touches the man who has a discharge must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. If the man with the discharge spits on anyone who is clean, they must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Everything the man sits on when riding will be unclean, and whoever touches any of the things that were under him will be unclean till evening; whoever picks up those things must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening. Anyone the man with a discharge touches without rinsing his hands with water must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and they will be unclean till evening.” Lev. 15:4-11.
These rules were obviously designed, by God, to nip in the bud any potential epidemic.
What makes the Bible’s emphasis on washing and sanitation, in addition to isolation or quarantine, so remarkable is that the germ theory of infectious diseases, although hinted at by certain classical writers such as Lucretius, Marcus Terentius Varro, and Galen, was not well understood until the late 19th Century, after extensive experimentation and observation by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Only after these men had firmly established germ theory did the need to wash things—hands, clothes, bedsheets and other items—become obvious.
Yet in 1,500 BC, thirty-three centuries before today’s civilization understood germ theory, the author of Leviticus knew the importance of sanitation in the prevention of epidemics. Do you think it could it be because “all Scripture is God-breathed”?
One of the heroes of science who, before germ theory was established, was valiantly attempting to convince doctors to wash their hannds was the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. Semmelweis was the chief resident at Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. The hospital had two free maternity clinics for poor women and unwed mothers; the First Clinic was operated to train medical students, the Second Clinic to train midwives. The incidence of death from puerperal fever was three times higher in the doctors’ clinic than in the midwives’, a fact that became known throughout Vienna—Semmelweis observed women actually begging to be admitted to the Second Clinic, the midwife clinic, rather than the doctors’ clinic. Even women giving birth in the street, with no attending physician or midwife, had a lower incidence of death from puerperal fever than in the First Clinic.
Why were doctors spreading disease that midwives were not? Semmelweis solved this puzzle in 1847, when a physician friend of his, Jakob Kolletschka, was accidentally cut by a student's scalpel while performing an autopsy. Kolletschka developed fever and died. Semmelweis realized that medical students were carrying germs from the autopsy room to the First Clinic. This explained why the student midwives in the Second Clinic, who did not perform autopsies and had no contact with corpses, saw a much lower mortality rate. Realizing that puerperal fever was a contagious disease, and that contact with dead bodies was implicated in its spread, Semmelweis ordered the doctors under his authority to wash their hands with chlorinated lime water before examining pregnant women or those giving birth.
The results could not have been more dramatic: the mortality rate in the First Clinic declined by ninety percent. The mortality rate in April 1847 was 18.3%. After Semmelweis instituted handwashing in mid-May, the rates in June were 2.2%, July 1.2%, August 1.9%. The death rate was zero in two of the months in the year following Semmelweis’s handwashing order.
Semmelweis had confirmed what Scripture had first taught over three millennia ago: when you touch the dead, you are unclean and need to wash. Anyone who had touched a dead body had to go outside the camp. (Num. 5:1-4). The cleansing ritual that was required to re-join the camp involved seven days of quarantine, and bathing. “Those who are being cleansed must wash their clothes and bathe with water, and that evening they will be clean.” (Num. 19:19). There also special rules for Nazirites (Num. 6:9-12) and Priests (Ezek. 44:26-27) who had touched corpses, emphasizing the point that the dead are unclean. The Bible also quarantines, for seven days, mothers who have just given birth, in case they have acquired an infectious disease like puerperal fever (Lev. 12), so there was quarantining on both ends of the equation, the corpse and the mother.
As with so much of Scripture, there is clearly more than human wisdom involved in the rules and regulations regarding ceremonial uncleanness. A God of love designed these rules to arrest the spread of infectious disease.