L15-6: Why a man is forbidden from fighting in battle on the day he has sex with his wife

“‘If a man has a seminal emission, he is to bathe his entire body in water; he will be unclean until evening. Any clothing or leather on which there is any semen is to be washed with water; it will be unclean until evening. If a man goes to bed with a woman and has sexual relations, both are to bathe themselves in water; they will be unclean until evening.”-Leviticus 15:16-18

In Leviticus chapter 15, verses 16 to 18 deal with normal male seminal discharges.

Of course, these types of emissions have nothing to do with disease or dysfunction.

The UNCLEANNESS that results would include the perfectly God-ordained act of a man having sex with his wife.

After the sex act, a wash and a wait until sunset is required to restore their purity.

The state after seminal emissions is the least possible state of UNCLEANNESS, yet it is UNCLEANNESS nonetheless.

Both the man and his wife are barred from participating in religious practices until CLEAN again.

In fact, if an Israelite soldier has sex with his wife on any given morning, he is prohibited from fighting in battle that day.

The reason is because when the Israelites fought against their enemies, it was a HOLY war.

And when I say HOLY, I mean that in every sense of the word based on what we’ve learned thus far.

Remember, I said that it is absolutely forbidden under ALL circumstances for the UNCLEAN to come into contact with the HOLY.

When a soldier has sex with his wife, he is UNCLEAN and thus no participating in anything HOLY until sundown, which obviously would include a HOLY war. 

Here’s another interesting distinction between ABNORMAL male discharges and NORMAL male discharges.

When a man has an abnormal discharge, he is required to fully immerse himself in pure MAYIM CHAYIM or Living Water.

However, if the same man has a normal seminal discharge, the water he immerses himself into can be a mixture of mostly regular water with Living Water added to it.

In Hebrew, this particular concoction was called MIKVAH MAYIM.

In Bible times, the majority of MIKVAHs were stone pools filled up with water from a well or lake and then afterwards some Living Water was added to the mix (recall that “Living Water” was water taken from a moving source of water such as rivers.)

What was sometimes a great inconvenience was when a man who had an ABNORMAL discharge lived in an outlying village.

Because his discharge was of an abnormal nature, he was required to bathe in a MIKVAH filled with 100% MAYIM CHAYIM (living water) and thus sometimes had to travel a great distance to fulfill this particular Torah requirement.

This is interesting.

The man with an ABNORMAL discharge has to bathe in 100% Living Water.

However, a married couple after engaging in normal sexual relations are allowed to bathe in the more common water mixture that only had a little bit of Living Water added to it.

This illustrates a point I’ve mentioned more than quite a few times now.

There are different degrees of UNCLEANNESS and accordingly there are different levels of cleansing required.

One final point.

For most of the world’s religions, sex was a normal and customary part of their rituals, usually connected to fertility rights.

However, in stark contrast to the world, the God of Israel took strong measures to ensure that anything connected to human sexuality or human reproduction was barred from His HOLY grounds.