Pestilence: Leprosy vs. Black Goo - Metzorah - Mythic Torah

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Metzorah, the 5th reading of the book of Leviticus, that deals with purity/impurity laws surrounding leprosy in people and houses, as well as menstruation.

The Venom Symbiote, Spider-man 3

There's a common science-fiction trope in which a black, viscous substance infects people and takes over their bodies. X-files, Helix, Prometheus and Spider-man all feature a threatening Black Goo that corrupts and spreads with a reason and purpose we can't really comprehend.

The black oil functions as disease given corporeal form, a physical manifestation of our greatest fears about illness, as human beings get infected and lose control of our bodies. This ichor can't be reasoned with or spoken to, it is a faceless, relentless force that can never be entirely gotten rid of.

Magic: the Gathering has its own example of this trope that is particularly relevant for our Torah portion of Metzorah - the Phyrexian oil. Magic's Phyrexians are an infectious, invasive force that consumes and compleats people, animals, plants and whole worlds and environments. It is a living, intelligent disease that corrupts not only living beings but rocks and planets, and as long as a single drop survives Phyrexia can be reborn.

Metzorah stands in interesting contrast with this trope. Our Torah reading is concerned about illness, and in particular Tzara'at (translated as leprosy but certainly not our modern disease that has the same name) that can infect both people and houses, rendering both impure and requiring various diagnoses and rituals to remove the problem.

And yet we never get a sense that the Tzara'at is a being, or is caused by a being, acting with intention. Where the Black Goo acts as if it has intelligence, one that may be beyond our comprehension, Tzara'at is presented without personality or a sense of purpose - it just happens.

This might strike you as obvious - and indeed it may fit well with our modern sense of disease - but it is not the only way that sickness is presented in the Bible.

Let me introduce you to Resheph, the god/demon of disease.


Deuteronomy 32, the Song of Moses, speaks about God punishing the people after they sin:

²³ ‘I will heap calamities on them
    and expend my arrows against them.
²⁴ I will send wasting famine against them,
    consuming resheph and deadly plague;
I will send against them the fangs of wild beasts,
    the venom of vipers that glide in the dust.
 

Phyrexian Unlife, from Magic: the Gathering

 Usually translated as pestilence, Resheph is part of the package of affliction that God will send against Israel, coupled with famine and wild beasts. Note the connection being drawn here between God's arrows and the Resheph, an important image of disease deities and demons, that can also be seen in Psalm 76:4, that talks about Rishphei-Kashet that seems to mean the Reshephs of the bow (Psalm 78:48 also uses the word in the plural).


But it is Habakkuk 3 that presents the most troubling image of Resheph in the Bible (the same chapter I discussed here in relation to Leviathan):

³ God came from Teman,
    the Holy One from Mount Paran.
His glory covered the heavens
    and his praise filled the earth.
⁴ His splendour was like the sunrise;
    rays flashed from his hand,
    where his power was hidden.
⁵ Plague went before him;
    Resheph followed his steps.

 The idea that diseases are spread before and behind God as He marches with His Glory is a very difficult image, though one that makes more sense when you think of the plague and the pestilence here as supernatural beings that literally go before God in His entourage, not impersonal illnesses. This idea was known to the rabbis of the Talmud, who say in Berachot 5a on Deut 32:24 that 'Resheph only means demons'.

Resheph in the Bible seems to be almost demonic being, one that has been de-mythologised to various extents in different places into the notion of 'pestilence' but retaining the idea of an archer deity, that strikes people down with burning arrows of disease.

Other near-Eastern mythologies share this threatening, powerful figure. The Ugaritic texts attest to a deity called Resheph, who is connected to Nergal, God of the Underworld, and functions as a gatekeeper to the world of the dead. He is a god of plagues and war, spreading death and destruction through his arrows.

The Bible then sits in a very interesting hybrid place (as is so often the case). On the one hand we have Resheph presented as a demonic, destructive being, a personified archer of pestilence and disease, like the Black Goo that has an agenda of its own. On the other hand we see sickness presented abstractly and without personification, something that makes you impure as a brush with death usually does, but not a being to be petitioned or reasoned with.

The black oil from Prometheus

What does this have to do with Metzorah?
Leviticus is interested in the question of how we can fix what has gone wrong - how can we return to God when something has come between us? How can we become pure and holy when the world is full of impurity?

Our Torah reading does not want us to think of Tzara'at, or sickness in general, as a demonic force but rather as just something that happens to us, something requiring treatment. For Metzorah, the realm of the divine is not one that has disease in it - sickness is a source of impurity and thus beyond the realm of God and the sacred.

The Black Goo of Science-Fiction is so scary because it cannot be stopped, cannot be reasoned with, and corrupts with intention and without mercy - and it is effective as an image because sometimes disease feels that way. We may feel like a demonic force has hunted us down, deliberately hit us with sickness.

But Metzorah wants us to think about disease impersonally, as just something that happens, something that has to be dealt with and overcome. Yet what may seem like a more scientific approach, nevertheless locates Tzara'at within a framework of religion and ritual.

We may no longer believe in pestilence as a personified being, but nevertheless sickness has a spiritual connection that we have perhaps lost touch with. It is a brush with death that may cause us to reorient our lives one way or another, that may call into question our beliefs about God and the world.

The demon Resheph and Metzorah's Tzara'at calls us to think of disease as a religious issue, something to be confronted and discussed in our sacred communities.