You Can Know You Have Eternal Life
#28 – God’s Standard for Mankind (12)
Medical knowledge in the Bible points to Divine Inspiration (2)
by Jim Mettenbrink

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     About 1445 BC, Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the 10 commandments of the covenant God made with Israel.  The books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy of the Old testament reveal over 600 laws governing every aspect of Israelite life.  Some of the laws governed sanitation of which Leviticus 17:12-13 commanded the people not to eat blood, but rather to bury it in the dirt.  Why?  Modern medical science tells us that when substances are buried, the spread of germs is minimized and the decomposition of harmful substances are hastened by micro-organisms which are in the ground.  The burial of blood eliminates the attraction for disease carrying insects and eliminates a culture medium for bacteria.
     Another command was to bury human body waste (Deut. 23:12-13).  Diseases such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid are evidence of man failing to follow this simple law regarding body wastes.  Although this might seem like common sense to us, when this law was written, the practice was merely casting excrement into the street.  Even in this century, many villages and towns around the world still have open sewers running curbside from their houses to local rivers.  Through time, millions died prematurely and hundreds of thousands die unnecessarily today from the failure to apply this simple principle of sanitation.
     For over 1000 years Egypt was recognized as the world’s foremost medical authority.  About 1100 BC Homer, writer of the Odyssey, wrote “In Egypt, the men are more skilled in medicine than in any other art or skill.”  The Persian kings employed Egyptian physicians as late as 500BC.  The fortunate discovery of a 25 foot long scroll of Egyptian medical practices from the period of Moses, reveals that Egyptian medical practices used animal dung, urine and blood in over half of the remedies for disease and ailments.  Animal dung, the remedy of the ancients, is known to harbor disease.  These are exactly the opposite of what Moses, who was reared in the household of Pharaoh (1500BC), had written.  Luke records that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of Egypt (Acts 7:22, New Testament).  Surely the educated Moses would have known better than to oppose the world’s medical authority!
     Scholars are nearly unanimous that the world’s first laws or precepts of sanitation were laid down in the first five books of the Bible, all written by Moses.  These Mosaic laws were preventive not corrective.  From where did Moses come up with the idea of preventive medicine and from where did he get the laws about sanitation, which were completely contrary to his Egyptian education?  Was he a capricious rebel or was he inspired by God?

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      © Jim Mettenbrink; used by permission. rev.04xx-04xx
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