The Karaite Jews do their best to live according to the Torah. The entire earth is blessed because these Hebrew speakers have chosen to make their knowledge of Torah available to us. But I've noticed they still carry a little bit of baggage with them out of Judaism. I will illustrate it with the issue of beard-wearing.
Leviticus 19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.
Leviticus 21:5 They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.
Nehemiah Gordon was raised as the son of a prominent Rabbi. His love for truth forced him to convert to Karaism. Nehemiah wrote an article on whether or not men should wear beards. Read it now: Shaving and Sidelocks? The Real Meaning of Leviticus 19:27-28. The rest of this pesher will assume that you have read Nehemiah's excellent article.
I disagree with Nehemiah's conclusion that beard wearing is optional, but the research and knowledge that he unveils in the course of his discussion is beyond what any English speaker could have brought out. Nehemiah reveals the following things:
There is an important principle of Bible reasoning involved here. Most Jews will take a Law, then interpret it in the most liberal, permissive way possible. Nehemiahs interpretation is that shaving the head or the beard is ok as long as it is not as an act of mourning. He took the law and interpreted it "as is" without looking at how to connect it with other laws, without seeing it as a dividing line. He saw it as a single point of light, to be appreciated, and left alone.
Stop and think. Why wouldn't you shave your head as an act of mourning? What does that have to do with anything? Does this mean that it is ok for police officers to shave their heads when one of their buddies gets cancer and loses all his hair? Isn't that a type of mourning?
The Rushdoony approach is to take each law and take it as case law, where it stakes out a boundary that we must not cross. If you cannot even shave your head as an act of grief for a loved one, why on earth would you be allowed to shave your head for a lesser reason?
Nehemiah says that Absolom shaved his head every year without repercussions. I don't know enough Hebrew to verify this, but the King James uses the word "polled". To me this indicates a hair cut, not a head shave. Look it up in your Strong's Concordance.
The Jewish approach to the Torah is to treat each law like a star in the sky. Mysterious, alone, far away, and not connected to anything.
I believe the healthy approach to Torah is to treat each law, mitzvah, as a border post, enclosing a large body of acceptable behavior, and excluding what is unacceptable. But these laws are special; you can combine any two or three or dozen laws to get a clearer and clearer knowledge of the boundary between good and evil. Don't be one dimensional; the Torah is multi-dimensional in its intelligence and glory. It reflects our Creator.
For instance, look at the following law:
Deuteronomy 22:5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.
A beard is that which pertaineth to a man. A woman should not have one, and most do not. But that implies the converse; a man should not have a smooth face. Should not all men aspire to the social prominence of being a "bearded one", an elder, who is respected in the community? Let each one take their proper place under God.
By placing Deuteronomy 22:5 side by side with Leviticus 19:27, we see that a man should have a beard. How then can we explain the few cases where the Torah commands the shaving of the beard? Read the following scriptures on your own: (Numbers 6:4; Leviticus 14:9) At the end of a Nazirite vow, after the cleansing ceremony for leprosy, and after a woman was captured in war, the man or woman were to shave completely.
These three exceptions to the shaving law are like the exceptions to the Sabbath law. No one is to work on the Sabbath, yet the priests perform their duties in the temple and sacrifice animals on the sabbath without sinning. The Israelites marched around Jericho on the Sabbath, and did not sin. In exceptional circumstances, as commanded by God, it is ok to shave. But hairiness is the general rule.
Joseph shaved when he went before Pharaoh. But look, he had been in prison. Prisons harbor diseases. How do we know it was not just a cleansing ceremony, as when a man is cured of leprosy? There is no evidence that Joseph continued to shave after that. It is often assumed Joseph's brothers did not recognize him because he was clean shaven and they were not. The Bible does not say this, so it is wrong to assume it. Merely wearing Egyptian clothes and talking with an Egyptian accent would have been enough to fool his brothers, since they truely believed he had died twenty years ago. Most people today assume that the Egyptians were clean shaven. This is not the case. Study of Egyptian writings and paintings shows that they too had beards.
When an enemy woman was captured in war, the shaving of her head had a practical purpose. And it still does today. Although she would shave her head in mourning, it would allow the priest to properly inspect her for syphilis and other contaminating diseases. If the woman had been using makeup and hair dyes to allure her captor, the shaving of the head would take away her natural weapons. The besotted Israelite would see the woman in her true form, and could then make a properly informed decision about whether he still loved her and wanted to marry her. If she is deprived of her hair, then how much less a thing is it to deprive the captive woman of alluring makeup, lipstick, and perfume? If the woman was using skin whiteners, her true race would show up in her bare scalp. Without makeup and henna and eye shadow, her eyes might not be so alluring.
In the heat of battle, it is hard not to take advantage of the spoils right there on the spot. God's Law says the adrenalin pumped young soldier must wait a month before sampling his well-earned spoils. This simple month of abstinence, this calming down period, benefits the health of everyone in the Commonwealth of Israel.
Revelation 1:14 His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire;
Traditional artists renderings of Revelation 1:14 show God with a snowy white beard. Perhaps they had access to the original Hebrew text of Revelation. Perhaps that original text clearly had the word "beard" in it. Perhaps. One day all will be known.
Until then, wear your beard in the knowledge that you are imitating God, and all those mighty men of old that he most loved.