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Originally Posted by Sonic Youth 37
Okay, i'm iffy on this: If you enter a building (example:hospital) that contains dead bodies and you are completely unaware of the fact, can you have rendered yourself impure while being unaware of the fact?
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the answer is yes. In fact, I avoid such places as hospitals religiously, and one time a person almost dropped dead in the thrift shop near me and I felt terrible because my first thought was a prayer for their health, my second thought was a prayer for my dreads....
the ritual purity of Moses is a serious thing. Dead bodies are full of uncleanness, which is why Jesus said, ""Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which men walk over without knowing it."
The deal with unmarked graves is that cemetaries make a person ritualistically unclean to enter the Temple or the Sanctuary. As the Nazirites were an essential element of the Hebrew Liturgical Choir, and as such needed to mainain ritual purity to be able to enter the Sanctuary often, they were required to keep themselves in this state of purity. Many are also celebates, as there are three things which render a person unclean for the Sanctuary:
1) Menstruation/Childbirth [for both men and women equally]
2) Sexual relations and the emission of semen
3) Dead Bodies
This is also why Jesus said, "You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean."
In the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, we practice Levitical Ritual Purity as prescribed above, and do not enter the Church sanctuary under these conditions, but rather, pray outside within the gates, in what correlates to the Solomonic Temple's "Court of the Gentiles"...