Bad Theology

Text for today: Leviticus 19 xxviii

Amid various urgent moral exhortations concerning beards, necromancers, the fruit of trees in a strange land, and the priestly profits to be made from the rape of female slaves, God orders that His chosen people should not tattoo themselves, and should not commemorate the dead by cutting themselves.

God's dislike of self-harmers is doubtless rooted in His loathing for the prophets of Baal, who offered their own blood and pain to call their inattentive deity to action (I Kings 18 xxviii) before being murdered at the orders of the the prophet Elijah. The fact that Elijah lived some centuries after the laws of Moses were written would of course mean nothing from the Father's eternal perspective; the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Saviour's transfiguration demonstrates the simultaneous existence of all three prophets, and the essential continuity of their violent and primitive doctrines.

God's prohibition against tattoos is a reaction against the over-civilised ways the Hebrews have learned during their captivity. In Egypt, as in many ancient and prehistoric societies, tattooing was used for medical purposes; God's jealousy reserves the treatment of the sick to Himself and His servants, just as He reserves the right to afflict His people with crippling illnesses for no better reason than to show off His own power.