Exploring the roots of the Bible’s emphasis on ritual cleanliness
Mikveh at the Hasmonean winter palace in Jericho (second century BCE). From Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0.
In many ways, the complex system of ritual purity laws laid out in the books of Leviticus and Numbers is some of the Bible’s most obscure material for modern readers. To our eyes, it may be difficult to understand why there is such meticulous concern with the perceived pollution (ṭum’ah) caused by things like corpses, skin diseases, genital emissions, and the like. Why are the prescribed purification rituals, such as those pertaining to ritual bathing in a mikveh (plural mikva’ot), so specific and detailed?
In his column entitled “Getting Down and Dirty with Impurity,” which appears in the Winter 2024 issue of BAR, Yitzhaq Feder explores the background of the Bible’s sensibilities around ritual purity and impurity. He begins with a brief recognition of the groundbreaking work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose book Purity and Danger (Routledge, 1966) remains a cornerstone of scholarship on the subject. Douglas’s approach, which treats the biblical purity laws with an eye toward their symbolic significance, has provoked debate about the appropriateness of casting the minutiae of these laws as representative of abstract social or intellectual categories rather than addressing real pollution.
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Another crucial step in our understanding, according to Feder, lies in the application to the biblical material of evolutionary psychological approaches to disgust. He highlights the general concept of an invisible “contagion” that can transmit defilement to an individual. This contagion is as much a result of perception and belief as of any real transference. For instance, Feder highlights research exploring study participants’ unwillingness to don clothing worn by a hepatitis patient, on the one hand, or a serial killer, on the other.
To illuminate the matter further, Feder turns his attention to the world of the ancient Near East, in order to gain a sense of the cultural context and climate within which the Bible emerged, and with which it was in close conversation. “For human societies that had yet to discover microscopic germs,” he writes, “notions of pollution played a vital function in pathogen avoidance.” He cites a portion of a letter from the 18th-century BCE city of Mari in Syria that reads as follows:
The god is striking in the upper district, so I without delay took a bypass. Furthermore, my lord should give orders that the residents of the cities that have been touched [laptūtu] not enter the cities that are not touched, lest they touch [ulappatū] the whole land. And if there will be a campaign of my lord to the upper district, my lord must stop in Terqa. He must not move on to Saggaratum. The land is “touched” (i.e., infected).
Feder notes, “Even as the people of Mari interpreted the epidemics that devastated the region as expressions of divine anger, their public policy was much more down to earth, focusing on the quarantining of infected people and cities.” Indeed, even the word “touched” (Akkadian lapātu) closely parallels the modern word “contagion,” which comes from Latin com-tangere, “touched with”; similar semantic alignment is evident in the usage of the Hebrew root n-g-’ and the Greek term epaphe, both of which mean “touch.” These connections speak to a common frame of reference in how such premodern cultures understood the communal experience of infectious disease.
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In the biblical context, Feder highlights how different types of impurity demand different responses, ranging from a simple act like ritual bathing in a mikveh to banishment and elaborate sacrificial rituals. The type of defilement is carefully considered: The impurity of genital flows, for instance, is spread by means of the furniture on which the affected individual has sat or lain, while that associated with a corpse spreads throughout a room or enclosed space like a cloud of gas. In the latter instance, Feder asserts that the spread of corpse impurity is closely linked to the odor of the decaying body, which is associated with the release of the dead person’s soul (nefesh) from the body.
Finally, Feder notes that the biblical purity system also involves pollution that can occur as a result of certain types of transgression. These instances are referred to as “moral impurity,” and nearly all pertain to illicit sexual relations. He frames this type of impurity as metaphorical, leaving a stain that is metaphysical in nature but that nevertheless “threatens the perpetrator—and even the community at large—with divine retribution.”
Taken as a whole, Feder’s presentation illuminates the ways in which notions of purity and impurity in the Bible are deeply rooted in embodied experience. In his conclusion, he observes that “this recognition allows us to appreciate that the notion of pollution is based on psychological intuitions that have facilitated human survival from prehistoric times until the present day.”
For more on the roots of the biblical purity system, read the column by Yitzhaq Feder entitled “Getting Down and Dirty with Impurity,” published in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
Subscribers: Read the full column, “Getting Down and Dirty with Impurity,” by Yitzhaq Feder, in the Winter 2024 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
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