Tattoos

Leviticus 19:28 Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.

Have you ever used flash cards to memorize material? I have! In fact, I have some sitting on my table right now. You see, I am reviewing Ancient Hebrew, something I learned over forty years ago! I need the cards to learn the vocabulary.

I also have some lists on my IPad of the same words. I can use a pen and write on top of the document, practicing the words by writing them. This adds another level of learning to my quest. And I need the extra level.

Can you recite the Ten Commandments in order? If you are like me, you probably get most of them, but not in order, and maybe not every element of every commandment. Memorizing can be difficult, can’t it!

Can you imagine trying to memorize all the laws of the Old Testament? It would be a tough task if they were just all jumbled together. But many people read these laws and see a jumbled mix, and they stop trying to understand the text, and simply rush through, missing the meaning.

One of the things people miss from this section of the Hebrew Bible are the things in the text that tell us where sections start and stop. There are often repeated phrases or reassertion of an idea that mark the beginning and ending of a section.

Our text includes one of those ending markers. “I am the LORD” and its longer versions serve as boundary markers for our text. They divide the laws into related groups of laws, often with a recognizable theme.

So if you read the groups of laws, using the “I am the LORD” marker to know where groups stop, then you can look for the common ideas in the various groups and you can gain new understanding of the text.

Our text talks about tattoos. Many people have them today, if you haven’t noticed. Are those people in violation of this Hebrew law? Some people thing so. I don’t, and here is why.

This law is in a group of laws dealing with the practices of idol worship. Eating meat with blood still in it, using divination and omens, cutting your hair in specific ways, cutting your body and tattoo marks. They were all connected to worshiping the gods of the cultures around ancient Israel.

It was in contrast to these other cultures that many of the Laws of the Scriptures were given. The LORD was setting up a countercultural community and he spelled out the differences he wanted between the cultural practices of Israel’s neighbors and the way he wanted them to live. It wasn’t that tattooing was evil in and of itself, it was that tattooing in connection to idol worship was wrong, because it was part of that other culture.

So next time you see someone with a tattoo, try to not see it as something evil, but more neutrally, with more acceptance. Unless of course they tell you it was part of their current worship practices. They you can keep your distance.