Leviticus 15:18

Leviticus 15 belongs to a run of laws about clean and unclean things that begins with clean and unclean animals (Leviticus 11) and goes on through childbirth (Leviticus 12) and skin diseases (Leviticus 13, Leviticus 14). The chapter itself (Leviticus 15) takes up discharges from the body. It opens with a man who has a lasting discharge (Leviticus 15:1–15), perhaps a disease such as gonorrhea. In these three verses it turns to the ordinary emission of seed, and then it gives the laws for a woman’s monthly flow and other discharges (Leviticus 15:19–30).

The chapter ends by giving the reason for all of it: “Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile my tabernacle that is among them” (Leviticus 15:31–33). The LORD had set his dwelling in the middle of Israel’s camp and promised to live among his people (Leviticus 26:11–12). A people with the holy God in their midst had to take care how they came near him. While a person was unclean, he could offer no sacrifice, enter the courts of the tabernacle or touch holy things. Numbers warns in the same way about defiling the tabernacle through the uncleanness that comes from a dead body (Numbers 19:11–13).

So these laws are lessons in God’s holiness, taught through the plainest things of daily life. Other nations had their own ideas of uncleanness, but Israel’s laws were bound to the one holy God and to his covenant with them. The LORD sums up their purpose himself: “ye shall be holy; for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44, and again in Leviticus 19:2). Keeping them was part of Israel’s faithfulness to the covenant, and it let the people live safely with God among them.

The uncleanness in these verses is a passing condition of the body, put right by water and the coming of evening. The verses ask for washing and waiting, and for no sacrifice or confession. The emission of verse 16 covers both what happens to a man in his sleep at night and what comes from lying with his wife. Verse 18 speaks of marriage itself, which God blessed from the beginning when he told the first couple, “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), and made husband and wife one flesh (Genesis 2:24). God commands and blesses this union, and a man bears no guilt for what happens while he sleeps.

The Hebrew word for unclean, ṭâmêʼ, means to be or become unclean, to defile, or to pronounce unclean. It covers uncleanness from many causes: disease, touching something unclean, and also unlawful acts. So the setting shows what kind of uncleanness is meant here, and these verses make it plain: a natural working of the body, the blessed union of marriage, and a remedy of water and evening. Sin (ḥaṭṭāʾt) is a transgression of God’s law. The uncleanness of these verses is a short state of the body that God brings to an end the same day.

The phrase “seed of copulation” is made of two Hebrew words. Zeraʻ means seed or grain, with the senses of sowing, sowing time, semen and offspring, and here it means semen. Shᵉkâbâh means “a lying down”, and it is used both of dew lying on the ground and of the sexual act, so the phrase is literally “a lying down of seed”. The verb “go out”, yâtsâʼ, is the common word for going or coming out, and here it describes the seed leaving the body. “Any man” (ʼîysh) makes the law apply to every man in Israel.

The man is to “wash all his flesh in water”. The verb râchats means to wash or bathe, the whole or a part of a thing, usually with water, and the words “all his flesh” (kol-bâsâr) make it the whole body here. Water (mayim) is the means of cleansing throughout the purity laws, and it pictures the removal of what defiles.

Washing comes first, and the man is still unclean until the evening (ʻereb). The waiting shows that God sets the hour when the uncleanness ends, and it makes sure the cleansing is complete before the man comes near holy things again. At evening he is clean and takes his full part once more in the life and worship of the people. The law gives a matching rule for a man who becomes unclean in this way in Israel’s camp (Deuteronomy 23:10–11). “Unclean until the even” comes again and again in Leviticus 15, for one discharge after another, and every time it marks an uncleanness with a set end.

Verse 17 carries the same law from the man to what he uses. Any garment, and anything made of skin, that the seed has touched is washed with water and is unclean until the evening, just as he is. Uncleanness in Israel passed by contact from a person or a substance to the things around it, and the law of Numbers 19, about contact with the dead, works the same way. That is why the cleansing had to reach the clothes and leather as well as the body.

The verb for washing in this verse is kâbaç, a different word from the râchats used for the man’s body. Kâbaç means to wash, cleanse or purify, and it is the word used for washing cloth. Strong’s and BDB give treading as the way the washing was done, by stamping the cloth with the feet as a fuller did. So Hebrew uses one verb for bathing a person and another for washing clothes, and this chapter keeps them apart.

Verse 18 turns to the woman “with whom man shall lie with seed of copulation”, that is, a husband and wife in the ordinary, lawful union of marriage. “They shall both bathe themselves in water”, with the same verb, râchats, that is used for the man in verse 16, and both are unclean until the evening. The law treats them alike. Neither one carries the uncleanness alone, and both share the same simple way back to cleanness before the day is out.

Every washing in this chapter was outward and had to be repeated, because the next emission or the next night of marriage brought the same uncleanness again. Paul calls such laws “a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:17). The prophets already called Israel to a washing of the life: “Wash you, make you clean” (Isaiah 1:16). Jesus taught that what truly defiles a person comes from within, out of the heart (Mark 7:15–23).

That inner defilement is what Christ came to cleanse. He took on our flesh and lived a fully human life, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Hebrews sets his sacrifice beside the old purifications, the blood of animals and the ashes of a heifer that sanctified “to the purifying of the flesh”, and asks, “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13–14). We are “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10), and his blood “cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

The water of Leviticus looks ahead to “the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5). Christ presents his people holy and unblameable in God’s sight (Colossians 1:22), clean for good and far beyond the evening. Because of him we may come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16) and worship the Father in spirit and in truth (John 4:24).

These verses show a God who lives among his people and cares about every part of their lives, even what happens at night and inside a marriage. His holiness is great enough to reach the most private places, and his kindness meets it there. He names the uncleanness, gives the way back, and sets its end at the next evening, so that no one in Israel stayed shut out for long. The same God has given us in Christ a cleansing that never needs repeating, and the body he once regulated with water is now the dwelling of his Spirit.