I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 19-21.

    Today’s passage contains more details on how the children of Israel should apply some of the rules God had given them previously. Among the instructions given here were instructions about how they were supposed to care for the poor among them. They were told not to harvest the grain along the edges of their fields, leaving it there for the poor. There were a couple of other things in this instruction. The point is that they were to leave the poor the opportunity to work to provide for themselves. Actually, as I read it, it was intended that they were to create opportunities for the poor to work to provide for themselves. A little later they are instructed not to favor the poor in legal matters, but neither are they to be partial to the rich and powerful. Overall, I think the passage makes it clear that God wishes us to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to provide for their, and their family’s, needs.

    There are two ways this applies. First, we should run our businesses in such a way as to leave opportunities for the poor to make a living “around the edges”. We should not run our business so as to capture every little efficiency and every dollar possible. We should strive for the “high margin” aspects of the business, allowing those less fortunate to capture the “low margin” productivity around the edges. I will note that this allows the more industrious among the poor to perhaps find a way to turn those “low margin” things into “high margin” things and thus move themselves out of poverty. The second way this applies is that the government should not establish laws and rules which freeze the poor out of finding ways to provide for themselves.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 14-15.

    In today’s passage it describes what a person who had a skin disease should do when a priest finds that he has been cured. The result of these commands is that the officiating priest has an incentive to find the person cured. On the other hand, the incentive is not nearly enough to encourage the priest to find someone who is clearly contagious as cured. It goes on to address dealing with a house which has become contaminated with mildew or mold (we assume mildew, the word used is the same as the word used to describe skin diseases). We know today that several types of mold are unhealthy and that if allowed to become too prevalent in a house they can never be gotten rid of. Finally the passage discusses actions to make sure that people are not accidentally exposed to the bodily fluids of others. Once more, we know today that many diseases can be more easily spread through exposure to the bodily fluids of someone who is infected with them.