(Deuteronomy 23) Your camp must be holy
(Translation from Chinese. For much of it I used ChatGPT.)
Deuteronomy 23:12-14 says, “You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.“
Question: Since the Bible says we should be “holy,” why did it take so long to teach about covering excrement? Why wasn’t this commandment given at Mount Sinai forty years earlier?
Answer: There is a Jewish legend that shortly after exodus from Egypt, the Israelites ate manna that came from the heavens, so that their metabolism produced no waste, and they didn’t require excretion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna. The Bible’s teachings of Deuteronomy came forty years later (see Deuteronomy 1:3), and they were about to cross the Jordan River to the Promised Land, where they were going to start consuming local produce (Joshua 5:11-12 states: “And the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. And the manna ceased the day after they ate off the produce of the land. And there was no longer manna for the people of Israel, but they ate off the fruit of the land of Canaan that year”), which would generate waste requiring excretion. Therefore, it’s only now that the Bible needs to instruct on how to cover excretion, making ‘your camp… holy’.”
While the manna in the wilderness is pure, the wilderness was not the Creator’s intended workplace for the Israelites. Although the produce of the Promised Land contains impurities that the human body cannot absorb, that place is where we practice the teachings of the Bible in our ordinary world. Removing impurities and absorbing useful things are parts of our everyday life. In this process, the unpleasant sight or smell of excrement is hard to avoid. ‘Being holy’ doesn’t mean we should live in a vacuum, nor does it require us to fast to avoid producing excrement. Remember, it is the Lord Himself who arranged our lives in this unavoidably impure world. He teaches us not to simply escape but how to properly react against the impurities in this world. Prepare a trowel… and use it to dig and turn to cover. This is what this passage of the Bible instructs us about being holy.
[Note: My explanation above differs from that of Talmud Yoma 75b https://www.sefaria.org/Yoma.75b.13?lang=bi.]