Cleanliness in Camp

(Deuteronomy 23:9 - 23:14)
“When you set up camp while waging war against your enemies, avoid anything that is ritually impure.  If one of your men is ritually impure because of a nocturnal emission, he must remove himself from camp for the day.  He should stay away from camp until evening when he is to bathe himself, returning to camp at sunset.

“Establish a designated area outside of camp to be used as a latrine.  Each man should have as part of his equipment a shovel so that when he urinates or defecates he can dig a hole for that purpose, then cover it up with dirt.  The camp must be kept holy because Jehovah your god moves about in it as he protects you and defeats your enemies.  He does not want to be exposed to anything indecent -- or else he may turn away from you!”

Notes
1. Jehovah continues his micromanagement of Israelite affairs, apparently thinking that his Chosen People are too stupid to figure out it needs to make a place where soldiers can relieve themselves.  The reason for it, though, seems less for the sake of the Israelites than for Jehovah, who wants to make sure he will not offended by any unsanitary conditions.  The Victorian dictum “cleanliness is next to godliness,” has its corollary here, “cleanliness (in the sense of maintaining ritual purity) is part of godliness.”  And there is the threat that if Jehovah does not find everything squared away in camp, he will abandon the Israelites -- a rather petty threat for a presumed god to make.

2. Surely there is a certain impracticality in the rule that a soldier must absent himself from camp for a day if he has a nocturnal emission (colloquially, a wet dream, literally, an involuntary ejaculation occurring during sleep).  One can imagine the scenarios.  “Where is Captain Nehemiah?  Why isn’t he attending our meeting of officers to discuss our strategy to defeat the Canaanites?  Oh, he had a wet dream last night and won’t be able to come back to camp till after sunset.” or “Why can’t Benjamin perform guard duty today?  He got out of it by saying he’s ritually impure because he supposedly had a nocturnal emission last night.” and “We don’t see much of our sergeant in camp these days.  He keeps having wet dreams!”  The situation seems patently ludicrous and one unlikely to further troop morale or personal dignity, being, at least to modern sensibilities, an embarrassing intrusion upon one’s privacy.