Deuteronomy

Quarantine and Community

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 83-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 83

Dictation Name: RR187AT83

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord and to sing praises unto Thy name oh most high, to show forth Thy loving kindness in the morning and Thy faithfulness every night. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee that Thy wisdom exceeds the understanding of men and Thy righteousness, Thy justice, surpasses all that man can conceive. We therefore commit ourselves unto Thy hands, knowing that Thy ways are all together just and holy. That Thy purposes are all together good and Thy purpose for us is our eternal glory in Christ Jesus. Give us faith so to walk day by day that in all things we are more than conquerors in Christ. In His name we pray, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 24:8-9. Our subject: Quarantine and Community. Deuteronomy 24:8-9.

“Take heed in the plague of leprosy, that thou observe diligently, and do according to all that the priests the Levites shall teach you: as I commanded them, so ye shall observe to do.

9 Remember what the Lord thy God did unto Miriam by the way, after that ye were come forth out of Egypt.”

Now this text is a very, very important one for our day. This text immediately concerns leprosy. The word as it is used in the Bible includes a variety of serious infections, one of which is the leprosy we know today. This leprosy called Hanson’s Disease was near the disappearing point before World War Two, that is, here in the United States. Now especially with the influx of aliens from south-east Asia it is emphatically on the rise. However, even as we as a nation have rejected the biblical requirement of quarantine for AIDs, so too we have abandoned it for leprosy, even though it is increasing.

It is being caught by others than those from south-east Asia. We shall before the morning is over I hope understand why, why we have done this. One commentator has observed of our text that primitive societies typically see disease as a religious matter. The question however is one of ultimacy. Today we are approaching a state of mind where virtually everything is a political rather than a religious matter. Can we honestly regard as primitive or backward those who view all things as essentially religious? Are not we equally superstitious or primitive, if you want to use those terms, if we view everything as political? It is an aspect of the stupidity of the modern mind that it sees nothing as wise except itself. This is provincialism of an amazing kind. This law as do others makes a quarantine mandatory. There always have been a tendency to relax the law where the wealthy and the powerful are concerned. God allows no such exemptions and we are reminded that not even Miriam, sister to Aaron and Moses, was spared. She had to be quarantined. Morecraft has pointed out and I quote:

“God identifies Himself as the God who separates His people from other peoples. Therefore separation including Christian intolerance of other religions and Gods is a basic principle of biblical law with respect to religion and morality.” Unquote.

Morecraft is very much to the point. When God separates us to Himself more separation must follow. We then separate ourselves from evil, moral and physical evils. Quarantine thus is a logical consequence in the medical sphere. Being a Christian does not make us immune to being killed by a fire or from drowning. We avoid dangers instead of courting them and where God requires a separation we make it. Another commentator has said that this law has as its purpose increasing the priestly power. This he grounds on verse eight where we are told ‘do according to what the priests and Levites shall teach you’.

All this passage does is to say that the priest had authority as public health officers, nothing more. The search for supposedly primitive motives and goals leads scholars to amazing absurdities. The basic meaning is very different. As Kyle [unknown] ably commentated and I quote:

“The thought here therefore is be on thy guard because of the plague of leprosy, that is, that thou dost not get it, have to bear it. As the reward for thy rebellion against what the priests teach according to the commandment of the Lord, watch diligently that thou do not incur the plague of leprosy, the vulgate reads, or [unknown] rendering: that thou do not sin that thou art punished with leprosy.” Unquote.

Leviticus 13-14 give us the laws on leprosy. This text is a reminder of those laws and are summons to take heed unto them. It is a warning not to be overconfident that we will not acquire the contagion. Infections have more than a single and simple physical cause. They can have a moral cause. Miriam was stricken because of her rebellion; to assume that a naturalistic causality marks all things is false. After all, we do not respond physiologically to everything, our response is not simply physiological. Why should it be so in God’s creation? If God is what He says He is, the maker of heaven and earth and all things therein, He is the ultimate cause of all things and can be an immediate cause. The fact that God ordains this law means that God is telling us our health is important. We cannot morally be justified if we abuse our bodies and play havoc with our health. From our Lord’s words in Luke 17:14 we see this law was still enforced in our Lord’s day and of course it was in medieval Europe and beyond.

The priest had to pronounce a healed leper clean or there could be no return to normal life. It is absurd to state as some do that priests then functioned as doctors. There were physicians in both Old and New Testament eras but it was a religious requirement that quarantine be instituted and also ended by the priests. The fact had to be governed by moral and religious premises. Civil authorities then and now are governed by political considerations. And in the last quarter of the twentieth century we have seen rules of quarantine set aside for political reasons. In the bible however see Miriam and centuries later King Uzziah segregated from others because of their leprosy. This religious character of quarantine provided an additional although not infallible check against the political abuse of this law. There is another aspect to the biblical law of quarantine, namely, membership in the community is not a right, it is a privilege. If membership is a human right then quarantine and any form of exclusion is morally wrong. Then too, excommunication becomes a violation of a right. There can be given the premise that membership in the community is a human right no exclusively male or female, protestant or catholic, white or any other kind of exclusive organization. Given the humanistic premise of human right we see the rise of legal bars against exclusionary rules. John Dewy saw in a common faith an anti-democratic and illegitimate character in biblical Christianity because of the division of people into the saved and the lost, the good and the evil.

If we say that it is a human right that there be no division then ultimately we destroy all law. But if we operate in terms of God’s law then we operate in terms of moral premises. It should not surprise us that quarantine laws have been dropped all over the world. If homosexuality and the AIDs disease are not grounds from barring people from society or from a job, or from serving food in a public eating place, then how can any form of separation or segregation in terms of faith and morality be maintained? In the history of Christendom the emphasis on community has at times been extended to the dead. An excommunicated man or a suicide, for example, could not be buried in a church graveyard, in hallowed grounds. This seems cruel and arbitrary to the modern man but it simply meant that the holy community was a very serious fact to its members. This fact of community has faded for us. At one time community had a momentous meaning. Monasticism was in medieval Europe held for centuries in very high esteem because the monks apart from the good they did in the way of charity, reclaiming deserts, building dikes and all, were highly regarded, something we forget today, because they prayed as representatives of the whole Christian community. If you were in a village near a monastery you knew that at all times, in some cases twenty four hours a day, a group of monks were praying for the community. Whether it was in England or Austria or Armenia, wherever! Continuous prayer for the people of their community.

Men outside the monastery knew that the monks were praying as their representatives. In the Book of Common Prayer we have a relic of this in both morning and evening prayer, a prayer for all conditions of men, a petition for the entire community. Because the community has been so important a fact over the centuries, excommunication or any form of ban was seen as a form of death. The community means life as against death. It is especially important that even the lepers of old upheld the community that barred them from membership. These lepers cried out to all who approached them ‘unclean, unclean’. They thereby protected the community from themselves. It was God’s community and the life of their loved ones who were healthy they felt they had to safeguard; so even the outcast lepers protected the community whose center was the sanctuary and the God of that sanctuary. If God be removed from this community there remains a collection of random persons, unconnected and without any overriding faith and loyalty. The lepers of old who cried ‘unclean’ had a greater sense of community than the godless men of our time. It should be apparent now how much modern culture has stripped man of community and of meaning. Confronted by a simple rule that indicates the implications of community and of separation or segregation, men see this as an obsolete rule of quarantine and valid no more. We are morally and intellectually self-impoverished. A further implication: we have had a form of quarantine in the imprisonment of guilty men.

The evidence indicates that this too is breaking down under the influence of humanistic equalitarianism. We have an Attorney General of the U.S. who has said it is her duty to protect the guilty. John Dewey’s demand for the destruction of all divisiveness in society is in process of following its inner logic. If there be no good nor evil, if we are to live in a world stripped of all moral discrimination why have courts? Why have prisons? This is a question which many humanists are raising. They are for the abolition of all discrimination and they see courts and prisons as a watered down form of heaven and hell, of biblical discrimination. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank Thee that Thy word recalls us to moral health, to justice and to truth. Grant that in a time when men are seeking to destroy all boundary marks that we affirm not the ungodly boundary marks of men or the ungodly destruction of all boundary marks, but Thy word, Thy division between good and evil, right and wrong. Grant us this we beseech Thee in Christ’s name, Amen.

Yes?

[Question] Has there been a civilization that has devised law [becomes unintelligible].

[Rushdoony] No, none have survived it and those who have attempted to have this total equality and the abolition of anything that is supernatural, have created total havoc and ruin and destroyed their civilization. The most signal instance of that being Persia which in 451 saw the [unknown] Revolution, total communism, of all property, of all women, of all forms of wealth, and the total destruction of all rules and standards. It was a great civilization and it went down the drain. It created great havoc in its ruin because it was the Turks when it was weakened that overthrew it and moved westward. But there have been attempts in this destruction, the whole direction of Rome was this way, in the Renaissance we had the same thing, and all one had to do is read some of the cynical readers of the time, [unknown], who has been read because his stories are sexy and titillating to many but the dominant motive is there are no rules left.

We are seeing systematically the replacement of courts in terms of the old law, did you commit the crime or didn’t you, replaced with a different type of court, where it is a psychiatric determination or an administrative determination. Now in the Bobbitt case what happened was that the jury surrendered the rule of law to a psychiatric court or a group of practitioners. This is the end of law and we are seeing it increasingly. Most of our law today is administrative law that has nothing to do with good and evil but did you meet the requirements or not, and not much law remains when you have that kind of standard, and of course quarantine goes down the tubes. And quarantine is regarded today as almost an immoral idea, that the practice of it is some kind of evil. As far as I know, now there could be other countries, there are only two countries that with respects to AIDs have practiced quarantine. One is Hungary, which being strongly in the western half Catholic, Calvinist in the eastern half, instituted it almost at once and has had virtually no problem with AIDs. The other is Sweden. Sweden has done it on the grounds that they want to prevent any restraint upon their free and open sexuality, they don’t want it to be endangered so they are segregating everyone who turns up with AIDs. Yes?

[Question] Cuba?

[Rushdoony] Cuba, yes, yes that’s right. As I said there could be others but they’re not many. But the premise of quarantine has long been a basic quarantine of Western civilization and one reason for the advancement of it. Historians like to ridicule western civilization because they hate Christianity and say how much we got from others, I’m reading a book on all the medieval technology at present, very exciting book, amazing how phenomenal the burst of creativity that followed the fall of Rome. William Carol Burke who some years ago in the fifties said that the church fathers were the frontier thinkers of western civilization and laid the foundations for modern freedom was absolutely right. The inventiveness was phenomenal. And this is why they could take, they could borrow ideas from the Egyptians, from the people of India, and China and elsewhere, and make them work; develop them to unprecedented extent, because they had a premise of quarantine, a difference. If you say there’s a difference between right and wrong, a good life and a bad life, you then are going to work to quarantine that which is bad and to improve that which is good. So the two went hand in hand, yes?

[Question] Exile is a form of social quarantine.

[Rushdoony] Very good point, exile is a form of social quarantine, and there are other ways I’m sure if we spent a little time we could think of forms of quarantine that have furthered society.

Any other questions or comments? Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank Thee that Thy word is indeed a light; it enables us to see far, far more than we in our darkness could possibly know. Make us a people of Thy word and by Thy spirit enable us to bring light unto this dark world. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.