the shrewdness of apes

a conversation with the wife about the Ten Commandments prompted me to crack open our version of "The Children's Living Bible". i'm sure the answer is no, but have any of you actually read this thing lately? shit is crazy. check out Leviticus 11:29-38 as Jehovah fills Moses and Aaron in on some of the "unclean" animals:

"These are the forbidden small animals which scurry about your feet or crawl upon the ground: The mole, the rat, the great lizard, the gecko, the mouse, the lizard, the snail, the chameleon. Anyone touching their dead bodies shall be defiled until evening, and anything upon which the carcass falls shall be defiled - any article of wood, or of clothing, a rug, or a sack; anything it touches must be put into water, and is defiled until evening. After that it may be used again. If it falls into a pottery bowl, anything in the bowl is defiled, and you shall smash the bowl. If the water used to cleanse the defiled article touches any food, all of it is defiled. Any drink which is in the defiled bowl is also contaminated.

"If the dead body of such an animal touches any clay oven, it is defiled and must be smashed. If the body falls into a spring or cistern where there is water, that water is not defiled; yet anyone who pulls out the carcass is defiled. And if the carcass touches grain or be sown in the field, it is not contaminated; but if the seeds are wet and the carcass falls upon it, the seed is defiled."

got that? the potential defilements go on for pages and pages and i won't even get into the passages on menstruation and childbirth (quick summary: be prepared to offer some sacrificial animals to your local priest). but fortunately for Christians, Jesus saved them from such rules. Orthodox Jews are ostensibly still bound by these laws, but have been allowed to skip the sacrifices since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. while this was interesting to learn about, it only served to reinforce that the more i learn about religion, the more peculiar it seems.