The simplest explanation is that sacrificial animals were always prescribed starting with God's killing the animals for skin-coverings for Adam and Eve, the first sacrificial animals. IOW, the RPW is from the beginning. This would necessitate an elementary distinction between clean and unclean, starting then. Which was surely elaborated by the Mosaic code later. That we don't have all the details means very little.

I think it is a mistake to seek for "natural" explanations for God's separation ordinances among the Israelites. Even if one may be suggested, 1) it can never be stated with certainty that had anything to do with the institution of the regulation; and 2) some things God dictated certainly had no natural explanation at all, most obviously in those matters pertaining to dress and appearance (e.g. "men, don't cut the corners of your hair").

The laws were what they were because God was creating a "peculiar" or unique people. So, for example, he took a specific set of symptoms associated with a disease they called leprosy, and attached a host of judicial connotations to it. It was now a picture lesson of living death. The priestly "diagnosis" had nothing to do with a person's (or a garment's! or a house's!) illness or cure. That would be a healer's or physician's job. Trying to make this business all about hygiene or quarantine is missing the point. The priest made a judicial declaration respecting a man's condition, based on set criteria. Only for this specific set of symptoms, no others. No other diseases had to do with a priestly judgment.

Note that even having this incurable disease, once a man was totally affected, from his crown to his sole, the priest should declare him "clean" again (Lev 13:12-13). That is proof enough this was God investing a particular issue with divine intention, similar to the rainbow: It looks like a war-bow for divine arrows of judgment, as if God hung it up once judgment was accomplished; and it means something covenantally significant because God declared it, not because there is no longer the physical possibility for a world-flood.

__________________
Rev. Bruce G. Buchanan
ChainOLakes Presbyterian Church, CentralLake, MI


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