Fitness for Proximity

To see it as medical or hygienic is to deny what God was forming in Israel.

“Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.”

— Leviticus 15:31 (ESV)

When God gave Israel its sanitation code, he was not thinking primarily about public health. That reading — ancient and persistent — mistakes the frame. Leviticus 15 does not close with a warning about bacterial transmission; it closes with a warning about the tabernacle. The concern is not physiological but spatial, not hygienic but holy. “Lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.” The threat is not infection but approach — drawing near to the presence of the living God in a condition the law declares disqualifying. Here, at the end of a detailed chapter governing bodily discharges, Israel’s legislation reveals its governing logic: what is at stake in purity is proximity.

A Logic That Relocates

That logic does not evaporate in the New Testament. It relocates. The question the whole biblical canon presses is not whether there are conditions for drawing near to God but where those conditions are met and by whom. To read Leviticus 11–15 in isolation is to inherit a code without a key. To read Mark, Hebrews, and Revelation without Leviticus is to receive the key without knowing what door it opens. The canon holds these texts together deliberately, and the Berean reader who examines them in sequence will find not contradiction but fulfillment — a boundary logic preserved, purified, and recentered on the one who alone qualifies us for the holy.

What follows traces that logic across the full canonical arc. The Torah’s purity legislation in Leviticus 11–15 establishes the governing framework: a boundary system built around the tabernacle, administered by priests, and designed to regulate fitness for approach to a holy God. The Gospel narratives then show Jesus operating within that framework while exceeding its power — restoring the disqualified, relocating defilement from the external to the interior, and fulfilling what the rites pointed toward. Hebrews reads the tabernacle typology Christologically, pressing the argument that Christ’s once-for-all atoning work accomplishes what the repeated Levitical offerings could only anticipate. And the Epistles and Revelation extend the purity concern outward — to the community the Spirit indwells, to the new Jerusalem where nothing unclean enters. The biblical purity laws are not an embarrassment to be explained away. They are one of Scripture’s longest and most patient preparations for the gospel.

The Tabernacle at the Center

Leviticus does not operate as a collection of isolated ordinances. It is a book organized around a single spatial reality: the tabernacle, the dwelling of the holy God in the midst of an unclean people. The book’s entire legislative architecture — the sacrificial system, the priesthood, the purity codes, the calendar — serves the fundamental question of how a holy God can remain among a people who are not. That question is stated plainly in Leviticus 16:16, where the great Day of Atonement rites cleanse the sanctuary “because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins.” The tabernacle itself requires periodic purification because uncleanness within the camp defiles it. The two are not insulated from each other. What happens in the camp affects what stands at its center.

Understanding this spatial logic is essential to reading the purity legislation of Leviticus 11–15 with any exegetical precision. These chapters govern a range of circumstances — dietary restrictions, childbirth, skin conditions, bodily discharges — and in each case the legislative pattern follows the same structure. A circumstance is named. A juridical status is declared. Prescribed acts are mandated — separation, washing, waiting, priestly inspection, and in some cases offerings. And then the purpose is stated, almost always in spatial terms: to distinguish holy from common, to protect the sanctuary from defilement, to maintain the conditions under which the holy God will dwell among his people. The purity code is not a medical manual. It is a boundary system.

The Hebrew word rendered “unclean” throughout these chapters — tāmēʾ (טָמֵא) — functions in this legislative context as a juridical-ritual category. It does not describe a moral condition in the first instance, nor does it identify persons or objects as inherently corrupt. It marks a temporary disqualification from sacred approach. The person declared tāmēʾ is not condemned; they are excluded from the sanctuary until the law’s prescribed procedures restore their eligibility. The period of exclusion, the acts required, and the priestly declaration of restoration are carefully specified. The priest’s role in this system is forensic and cultic: examine, declare, perform the prescribed rites, and readmit the restored person to the community’s full participation. He is a guardian of the threshold, not a physician of bodies.

The threshold he guards is theological, not architectural. The word underlying this entire system — holiness—qādôš (קָדוֹשׁ) — describes not a social distinction or a ritual performance but the essential nature of the God who dwells at the camp’s center. The term denotes absolute set-apartness, a categorical difference in kind rather than degree. It is the word the seraphim repeat in Isaiah 6:3, where its triple iteration — “holy, holy, holy” — signals a superlative beyond ordinary grammatical reach. What Israel is being taught through the cataloguing of conditions, the prescription of rites, and the mandatory waiting periods is that the God who dwells among them is categorically different from them. The purity system exists to make that reality inhabitable — to create conditions under which an utterly qādôš God can remain present among a people who are, in their ordinary creaturely life, frequently disqualified from sacred approach. The tabernacle stands at the center of the camp. The purity legislation stands guard around it.

The Healer Who Restores Fitness

When the Gospels record Jesus touching a leper, the shock is not merely social. In the world Leviticus constructs, the leper’s condition is not simply a medical diagnosis; it is a ritual-juridical status. The person with a skin disease, as Leviticus 13–14 details, is examined by a priest, declared unclean, required to dwell outside the camp, and obligated to announce their status publicly. They are excluded from the community of approach, barred from the tabernacle courts, separated from the assembly. When the leper of Mark 1:40 comes to Jesus — imploring him, “If you will, you can make me clean” — the language is the language of Leviticus, not merely of medicine. Clean and unclean are cultic categories. The man is asking not merely to be healed but to be restored to fitness for proximity, to be readmitted to the assembly, to stand again before God without disqualification.

Jesus’ response follows the shape of the Torah’s logic while exceeding its power. He stretches out his hand, touches the man, and says: “I will; be clean.” Immediately the leprosy departs. What follows is equally telling: Jesus instructs the man to say nothing to anyone but to “show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them” (Mark 1:44). The priestly procedure of Leviticus remains in view. Jesus does not abolish it; he sends the restored man to complete it. But the power of restoration is located not in the priestly rite itself but in the word and touch of Jesus. The rite confirms what Christ has done. The Gospel keeps the cultic frame while revealing where the cleansing power actually resided all along — in the one who stands behind and beyond the whole system.

Mark 5 deepens this account with characteristic precision. A woman who “had had a discharge of blood for twelve years” — a condition that Leviticus 15:25–27 explicitly governs as a source of uncleanness — presses through the crowd to touch the fringe of Jesus’ garment. “Immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease” (Mark 5:29). The Levitical vocabulary is preserved. The restoration is instantaneous and located in Jesus’ presence. Where the Torah’s rites required time, examination, and prescribed acts, the touch of Christ accomplishes in a moment what the law’s system pointed toward across generations. Jesus does not contradict the purity logic. He fulfills its purpose: restoring the disqualified to fitness for the holy.

Where Defilement Is Located

The most theologically sharp moment in the Synoptic witness comes in Mark 7, where Jesus engages the Pharisees over the tradition of the elders regarding handwashing. His response cuts to the operative logic beneath the Torah’s system: “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him” (Mark 7:15). He then lists the moral conditions — evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, and more — that issue from the human heart and constitute genuine defilement. Mark adds, in his editorial aside, that in this teaching Jesus “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19).

This is not an abolition of the purity concern. It is a radical clarification of where defilement is actually located. The Levitical system, with its dietary restrictions and external regulations, was never finally about the foods themselves; it was about maintaining the boundary between holy and common, between the people of God and the nations, between those who approach and those who cannot. What Jesus exposes is that the heart — the seat of human willing and acting — is the true site of defilement. And no external rite can reach it. The Torah’s system was never claiming otherwise; it was training Israel, through prescribed acts and boundary-maintenance, toward the recognition that they needed something the rites themselves could not finally provide. Mark 7 does not dismantle purity logic. It follows that logic to its necessary conclusion: the defilement that separates from God is moral and interior, and its resolution requires something more than washing.

The Once-for-All Approach

Hebrews reads the entire tabernacle system as a theological shadow cast by a coming reality. The argument is sustained and precise. The repeated Levitical offerings — daily, weekly, annual — demonstrate by their very repetition that they cannot accomplish what they signify. A sacrifice that must be made again tomorrow confesses, by its recurrence, that yesterday’s offering did not finally settle the matter. “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4). The offerings were not failures; they were faithful pointers. They bore witness to a cleansing they could not themselves effect, anticipating the one act that would render them permanently unnecessary.

The Greek word the epistle uses for this accomplishing work — cleansing—katharismós (καθαρισμός) — appears in Hebrews 1:3, where the Son, “after making purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” The term describes not a ritual procedure but the completed, singular act of atonement that the repeated Levitical rites had prefigured. What the priests performed annually in the Holy of Holies, emerging still mortal and still sinful, Christ performed once, entering the true holy places “by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). The sitting down is theologically decisive. No Levitical priest ever sat in the sanctuary; their work was never finished. Christ sits because his work is.

The consequence for the purity logic of approach is total and deliberate. Hebrews 10:19–22 draws out the implication with the cadence of a formal invitation: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” Every element of the Levitical system appears in compressed form: the holy place, the curtain, the blood, the priestly mediation, the sprinkling, the washing. And every element has been transformed. The curtain is Christ’s flesh, torn open by the cross. The blood is his own. The priest is also the sacrifice. The sprinkling reaches what the Levitical rites never could — the conscience, the interior site of defilement that Mark 7 identified.

The spatial logic of Leviticus is entirely preserved. The question of who may approach, and on what basis, remains the governing concern. But the means of approach has shifted decisively: not priestly examination and ritual acts, but the blood of Christ and the high priesthood he fulfills in his own person. The threshold exists. The conditions for crossing it are real. And Christ has met them, permanently, on behalf of those who are in him. The “drawing near” that Leviticus managed through boundary and rite, Hebrews announces as the permanent standing of everyone for whom Christ has acted. This is not the abolition of proximity as a theological category. It is its eternal securing.

A Temple Not Made with Hands

The canonical movement does not stop at Hebrews. John identifies the body of Jesus as the temple itself — “he was speaking about the temple of his body” (John 2:21) — and in doing so compresses the entire spatial logic of the Old Testament into a single person. The place where God dwells, where sacrifice is made, where approach is regulated, where the holy and the common meet: all of this is now located in Christ’s own flesh. When that flesh is raised, the temple is raised. The geography of holiness shifts from Jerusalem to the risen body of the Son.

Paul extends this relocating movement outward to the community Christ forms. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). The question is rhetorical but the claim is not. The same Spirit who rested on the tabernacle, filling it with the divine presence, indwells the congregation assembled in Christ’s name. The purity concern does not disappear; it intensifies. “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Corinthians 3:17). The holiness that once required the careful boundary-keeping of Leviticus now characterizes the community itself, not as their own achievement but as the consequence of the Spirit’s presence. The boundary has not been erased. It has been internalized — located now in persons and communities rather than in a structure of acacia wood and gold-covered boards.

Peter draws on the same complex of imagery to address the church’s priestly identity directly. Those who come to Christ are being built up as “a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ,” constituting “a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (1 Peter 2:5, 9). The vocabulary of Leviticus — holy, priest, acceptable, possession — carries forward without apology. The people of the new covenant are not less priestly than Israel; they are more comprehensively so. Every member of the community participates in a priesthood that required, under the old covenant, hereditary qualification, ritual preparation, and the constant management of uncleanness. That the entire church now bears this identity signals the full extension of what Christ’s once-for-all cleansing has made possible.

Revelation’s consummation holds the purity concern at its most uncompromising. The new Jerusalem descends from heaven, and the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Revelation 21:22) — the distinction between the dwelling and the dweller is finally collapsed. And the boundary around this final holy space is drawn with absolute finality: “But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Revelation 21:27). The tāmēʾ of Leviticus, the defilement that disqualified from the tabernacle courts, has its ultimate counterpart here. Nothing unclean enters. The new creation is a sanctuary without compromise, a holy space without defect. What Leviticus guarded through law and priestly rite is secured in the end through the Lamb’s atoning work and the keeping of his book. The spatial logic — who may dwell in God’s presence — arrives at its ultimate resolution not in a code of regulations but in a person, and in the record he keeps.

The Concern That Never Moves

The verse that opens this inquiry closes it with the same insistence. “Lest they die in their uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.” The concern of Leviticus 15:31 is not ceremonial formality but the conditions for inhabiting proximity to the living God. The canon never abandons that concern. It traces it from the wilderness tabernacle through the temple courts, through the synagogues where Jesus taught and healed, through the upper room and the cross and the empty tomb, into the community the Spirit inhabits, and forward to the city where the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Revelation 21:22). What changes across this movement is not the requirement that defilement be addressed before approach is possible. What changes is the recognition of where defilement is finally located, who has the power to remove it, and what the once-for-all katharismós of Christ makes permanently available to those who belong to him. The biblical purity laws do not embarrass the gospel. They are, read carefully and canonically, one of its longest and most patient preparations.