Last week I wrote a story for the Blanco newspaper mentioning how most Americans discount many stories in the Bible as being fairy tales or myths because “science” says so. In this and future articles I will offer some information that hopefully makes you think twice before acknowledging that “science” must be right and the Bible wrong when their answers conflict. The following is a true story. Ignaz Semmelweis was the director of a hospital ward in Vienna, Austria in 1847, when Vienna might have been the center of the medical world.
Semmelweis noted that less than 20% of pregnant women died of puerperal or “labor fever.” Remarkably, in that day, if a woman delivered a baby using a midwife, the death rate was only 3%. Semmelweis tried a number of things to reverse the trend. He even went so far as to stop priests from ringing their bells late in the evenings, thinking they were scaring the women to death.
After anguishing over the deaths for a number of years, he noticed that the young medical students performing autopsies on the dead mothers would rinse their hands in a bowl of bloody water, wipe them off on a common towel, and immediately return upstairs to begin examinations of the expectant mothers. Today, we would be appalled that such practices actually took place in institutes of what was at the time “modern medicine.” No doctor today would touch a dead person and then perform examinations on living patients. But to the best minds of science in the 1800’s, germs were unknown. It would be another fifteen years before Louis Pasteur would become famous for disproving the spontaneous generation of life and his work to help people understand germs.
Semmelweis ordered everyone in his ward to wash their hands thoroughly in a chlorine solution after every examination. In only three months, the death rate fell to 1%. Had Semmelweis made a groundbreaking discovery, or had he simply “rediscovered” what had been known for many years? Almost 3,300 years before Semmelweis lived, Moses had written: “The person who touches any human corpse will be unclean for seven days. He is to purify himself with the water on the third day and the seventh day; then he will be clean. But if he does not purify himself on the third and seventh days, he will not be clean” (Numbers 19:11,12). Semmelweis may have discovered how to deal with germs 200 years ago, but it was not something that hadn’t been dealt with centuries earlier.
In Numbers 19, Moses dictated how the Israelites were to prepare the “water of purification” to purify one that had touched a corpse. In verse 6, Moses writes “the priest is to take cedar wood, hyssop, and crimson yarn, and throw them onto the fire where the cow is burning.”
Let’s take a look at the ingredients of this “water of purification.” A search on the internet finds that among other uses, in oil form cedar is an antiseptic. I first heard the story of Semmelweis from a former professor at the Texas A&M Veterinary School. He said that in previous times of severe drought, autopsies of starved whitetail deer had revealed that one of the issues that led to their deaths was the absence of beneficial bacteria that aid in food digestion. Food was so scarce that these deer had been eating the bark off cedar trees, resulting in the reduction of these beneficial bacteria in the deer’s digestive system.
Hyssop is a plant native to the Middle East that contains thymol. Remember the Listerine TV commercial that ended with “kills germs that cause bad breath?” One of the ingredients of Listerine is the antiseptic ingredient thymol.
Have you figured out what could come from the ashes of cedar, animal fat, hyssop and water? Our ancestors knew: lye soap! Moses had given Israel the recipe for making soap!
But I left out one ingredient. What about the crimson yarn (or scarlet)? In Hebrews 9:19 we find that along with water and blood, Moses had sprinkled “scarlet wool” on the people. What benefit would wool have for soap? Have you not washed your hands with Lava soap?
Thousands of years before modern science had discovered germs, the Israelites were washing their hands after touching a corpse. Only 200 years ago the greatest minds of science knew nothing about germs. So how did Moses know what to do 3,000 years earlier?
As Paul Harvey made famous, what about “the rest of the story?” Why didn’t I learn his story in 10th grade Biology instead of Louis Pasteur’s? Instead of being lauded for his work, Semmelweis was ridiculed and ostracized by the Scientific community because he dared to lay the blame for untold thousands of deaths at the feet of so-called “learned” scientists. The ridicule became so great that Semmelweis was forced to return to his native Hungary to find work. He is reported to have suffered a nervous breakdown and died within 20 years of his discovery.
Despite what is believed by many, science is not always right. We encourage you not to lose faith in God’s Word because science says it cannot be true. As Christians, we believe the scientific foreknowledge displayed by Moses is one of many proofs that the Bible is divinely inspired, so we should not be ashamed to preach and teach it as God’s Word. Contact us with any questions or comments, and as always, we welcome you to join us for worship and classes.
Buz Turk
Blanco Hills Church of Christ
Worship: Sunday 11 am
Class: Sunday 10 am, Wednesday 3:30 pm
blancohillschurch.com
830-554-0701