Do not cut your bodies for the dead, or put tattoo marks on yourselves. Leviticus 19:28. This is the scripture that will appear in various tattoo magazines from time to time, & everyone seems to think that this means that tattoos are just plain forbidden. In context, many of these commands given were for a very specific period of time, & for very specific reasons, mainly because people were worshipping demons with cutting & bloodletting, blood drinking,child sacrifice, all night orgies, & other practices that were either spreading fatal diseases like the plague or were just out & out murder. Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech for you must not profane the name of your God Leviticus 18:2. I mean, come on, they were living in a time, 4000 years ago, when someone actually had to sit down & write a law saying that child sacrifice was a BAD thing! All of these things of course had a spiritual significance, but even in practical terms, drinking blood or sex with dozens of temple prostitutes just wasnt exactly a healthy thing to do. Necromancy was also a broadly practiced theme, & the tattooing was specifically for communing with the dead, & was a hell of a lot more than just getting a heart with Mom written in the middle. Do not cut yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 14:1. Many of these regulations were certainly specific to the time & place that they were written, a prime example are all the laws concerning slaves, up to & including penalties for sleeping with another mans slave.
Its obvious that body art isnt the issue here, the issue was the nation of Israel, rather literally, prostituting herself to pagan gods, & that wasnt a good thing. In fact, nose rings were used as engagement pieces, to the extent that when God himself is speaking allegorically of her chosen people, He mentions betrothing her with this piercing,.... I adorned you with jewelry: I put bracelets on your arms & a necklace on your neck, & I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears & a beautiful crown on your head. Ezekiel 16:11-12 (also in Genesis 24:22, Genesis 24:30, Genesis 24:47, Genesis 35:4, & Exodus 32:2-3). Piercings & all manner of body arts were used in the most sacred of the rituals, marriage, which was instituted by God as an earthly analogy of what it would be like to commune with him in Heaven.
In fact, I would venture forward to say that God himself is adorned with markings not dissimilar to tattoos,... although dont ask me who is artist is,... See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. Isaac 49:22. And like Father like Son, lets not forget the physical description given to a resurrected Jesus,... On His robe & on his thigh he has the name written: KING OF KINGS & LORD OF LORDS. Revelation 19:16. I can take it to a further extreme, & say that when Jesus rose from the dead, his wounds were not healed, He still bore them,... His hands, feet, side & scalp were all pierced, & were still there, as we can see when Thomas doubts the whole thing & demands to put his fingers in the piercings. Unless I see the nail marks in his hands & put my finger where the nails were, & put my hand into His side, I will not believe it. John 20:25. Those piercings were the most significant act in all of human history, changing everything about society as we know it for millennia.
We must keep in mind the Bibles perspective on flesh, its flesh that we try to separate whenever fasting is spoken of, its flesh that dies off & is laid back to the dust, & its the flesh that we are asked to crucify every day. Keep these last two passages in mind whenever some mindless right wing Pat Robertson drone is blathering on parroting some mindless garbage out of context about your body adornment or attire:
The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outer appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. 1 Samuel 16:7
Stop judging by mere appearances, & make a right judgment. Jesus Christ, John 7:21
