a cut slashed into the skin: the gash a mourner opened in his own flesh for someone who had died
This word names a thing rather than an action: the cut itself, the line opened in someone's skin. It appears twice, and both times it is forbidden. Leviticus 19:28 tells all Israel not to put a cut in their flesh for the dead, and Leviticus 21:5 tells priests not to cut a cut into their skin, a deliberate repetition that early Jewish readers took to rule out even a single slash.
Grief in the ancient world was worn on the body. Mourners tore their clothes, threw dust on their heads, went without food, shaved a patch of the head bare (קׇרְחָה), and slashed their arms, cheeks or chest. Poems from the city of Ugarit describe the god El hearing that Baal has died and then scraping his skin with a stone, cutting his cheeks and chin, and furrowing his arms and chest like a plowed field. The prophets report the same practice, using a different word for it (גָּדַד), among Israelites, Philistines and Moabites, and on Mount Carmel the prophets of Baal slash themselves with swords and spears until the blood runs. Whatever else this was, it was not an obscure foreign rite. It was ordinary mourning, and Israelites did it.
Scholars offer several reasons for the ban, and most of them fit together rather than compete:
- Blood shed for the dead looks like an offering made to them, and in Leviticus life itself belongs in the blood.
- Rites of this kind put the mourner on the side of the corpse, and death has nothing in common with holiness.
- A body deliberately scarred is no longer whole, in the way a priest or a sacrificial animal had to be whole.
The word is not a general term for a wound. It never describes an injury someone suffers by accident or in a fight: each time, a person is cutting his own skin on purpose, and each time he is being told to stop. The other kind of body marking in Leviticus 19:28, the design pricked permanently into the skin (קַעֲקַע), is a separate word and a separate ban.
Disputed
What the prohibition on cutting the flesh for the dead was aimed at. Many commentators hold more than one of these rationales at once rather than choosing between them.
- majorityThe cuts amounted to blood offered to the dead as powers beneath the earth, so the ban belongs with the priestly insistence that life is in the blood and with the wider polemic against caring for the dead as gods.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible 3A, 2000), 1687-1695; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989); Theodore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (HSM 39, 1989)
- minorityThe mourning acts, laceration among them, form one coherent set of rites that separate the mourner and align him with the corpse; the prohibition keeps death away from holiness rather than attacking foreign religion.; Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford, 2004); Saul M. Olyan, "What Do Shaving Rites Accomplish?", JBL 117 (1998) 611-622
- minorityThe ban protects the wholeness of the body, which mirrors the wholeness required of a priest and of a sacrificial animal.; Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, 1999); Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (NICOT, 1979), 272
- minorityThe pairing of the two verses belongs to a program that extends priestly holiness to all Israel, with the ban aimed at popular Canaanite religion.; Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence (1995); Baruch J. Schwartz, Torat ha-Qedushah (1999)
Whether the practice this word names belonged to an organized cult of the dead in Israel, or only to ordinary care for the dead.
- majorityIsrael and its neighbors maintained a working cult of the dead, visible in the Ugaritic texts about departed ancestors and in Mesopotamian offerings to them, and the biblical prohibitions are polemic against a widespread household religion.; Theodore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (HSM 39, 1989), 100-120, 174-178; Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel (1996); Herbert C. Brichto, "Kin, Cult, Land and Afterlife: A Biblical Complex", HUCA 44 (1973) 1-54
- minorityNo institutionalized ancestor cult existed in Iron Age Israel; the "cult of the dead" is largely a later rhetorical construction, and necromancy entered Judah under Assyrian influence in the seventh century.; Brian B. Schmidt, Israel's Beneficent Dead (FAT 11, 1994)
- contestedThe burial evidence shows sustained care for the dead without full-fledged worship of them, a middle position between the two.; Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead (JSOTSup 123, 1992); Rachel S. Hallote, Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World (2001)