Comentários de Citação sobre Deuteronômio 23:14

Can anyone … without excreting. You might ask: Is it not written (Devarim 23:14), “You shall have a shovel aside from your weapons, and it shall be when you sit outside…”? From there it seems that they did excrete. The answer is that they excreted [food] purchased from the merchants [not the manna].

And by way of the simple meaning of Scripture the verse warns that a man to whom a [nocturnal] pollution occurred, should leave the camp completely for the reason mentioned, that G-d walks among us to help us and the camp is holy, and that our hearts are to be intent towards the Holy One, blessed be He, hoping for His help and that we put not our trust in a human arm.²⁷⁷See ibid., 17:5. A similar reason is also for the command to cover excrement,²⁷⁸See Verse 14. for the entire camp is like the Sanctuary of G-d. From this law we deduce, concerning a place of prayer, that we must remove ourselves four cubits away from excrement [if it is behind us]²⁷⁹Berachoth 25a. or as far as the eye can see [if it is in front of us]. However, our Rabbis interpreted it:²⁸⁰Pesachim 68a. In other words, while according to the plain meaning of Scripture the person who suffered a pollution is to leave the entire camp, the Rabbis say that he is required to leave only the camp of the Levites, and, of course, the camp of the Divine Presence, if the ark of G-d was there with them (see above 10:1). See also “The Commandments,” Vol. I, p. 39, Note 2 with respect to such “camps” in the city of Jerusalem. An army with the ark of G-d in its midst has the status of “a Sanctuary of G-d” as Ramban expressed it above. Therefore the laws of the three camps into which Jerusalem was divided when the Sanctuary existed were also applicable to an army camp. “Then shall he go abroad out of the camp, he shall not come within the camp²⁸¹Verse 11. — neither in the camp of the Levites, nor in the camp of the Divine Presence” when the ark of G-d was there with them. The covering of excrement also, in their opinion, is required when mentioning G-d’s Name in prayer or in the reading of the Sh’ma. If so, this too, is an admonition which he restated²⁸²The commandments pertaining to sending out the impure have already been stated in Numbers 5:2-3. But here they were “restated” with respect to an army etc. here with respect to an army in order that everything should not be as lawless as in the camps of the peoples. These commandments as well are then explanatory [of those mentioned before].²⁸²The commandments pertaining to sending out the impure have already been stated in Numbers 5:2-3. But here they were “restated” with respect to an army etc.
Now, the reason for covering excrement is not because excrement is like something unclean that defiles its location and breaks through and rises [like the impurity of the dead]. Rather it is because it is forbidden to see it during time of prayer when the heart cleaves to the Glorious Name,²⁸³Further, 28:58. because ugly things give rise to ugliness in the soul and they confound the intent of the pure heart, but when it is hidden from the seeing eye there is no harm.

A Midrashic approach to this wording based on Bamidbar Rabbah Shelach 16,15: the word “in its midst,” means that the people did not even have to turn around in order to witness the miracles G’d was performing. The meaning of the words קרב וכרעים is used in the Talmud Yuma 75 as an allusion to the manna being food which was totally absorbed by the bodies of the people eating it, there being no excrement, waste material from it. If this is true, the question is why the Torah legislated in Deut. 23,14 that the soldiers should be equipped with tools to bury their excrement in the earth in order to maintain the holy nature of a Jewish encampment even during war? What excrement did the soldiers have to bury, seeing they ate manna? Answer: they had to bury the excrement of the food they had purchased from the surrounding nations and had eaten it.