Ritual Impurity

This article examines the relationship between disease, pollution and sin in the Priestly writings, focusing on the rites for the purification of ṣara‛at in Leviticus 14. In particular, it will evaluate the contested question of whether this text is implicitly polemical in light of ancient West Asian rituals dealing with similar subject matter, especially a ritual for the treatment of skin disease from Emar. These comparisons will enable a more precise characterization of the Priestly agenda reflected in Leviticus 14 and suggest that the traditional notion of pollution in Israel has been deliberately reinterpreted.

This article examines the dual tenet generally upheld by scholars of Second Temple Judaism that a single concept of impurity existed in that period, and that purity and impurity formed a coherent, unified system of meaning. Herein I will contend that we should turn our focus on the phenomenological aspect of a specific source of impurity, and study this in its broader cultural contexts. Centering on corpse impurity as it appears in a selection of narrative, halachic, and archaeological sources, this article treats purity and impurity as an order of meaning inherently interconnected with that of honor and shame – which was equally dominant in the thought and practices of ancient Judeans – and identifies three modes of relationship between these two orders of meaning: 1) impurity as attached to shame, 2) impurity as attached to honor, and 3) corpse impurity as symbolizing the contrast between human and divine honor. Finally, I argue that the different functions and meanings of impurity, honor, and shame in each of these modes of interrelationship may be explained by the two networks of social relations to which all Judeans in Second Temple times belonged – the kinship one and the cultic one – and which, albeit partly overlapping, need to be distinguished for analytical purposes. The approach proposed here enables us to establish a link between God and the system of ancient Judean ritual purity in a way that suits the preeminence of metonymy as a strategy of representing entities that stands at the core of this order of meaning – especially when the dead are concerned – rather than the metaphoric and symbolic explanations which currently prevail.

This chapter will bring Smith’s insights on ritual to bear on scholarly discussions of the historical process in late ancient  South Asia known as “Brahmanization.” In particular, I will discuss scholarly claims about how the political and cultural phenomenon of “Brahmanization” affected the Indian Buddhist monastic institution at the turn of the Common Era. By Brahmanization, I am referring to the spread of those social forces associated with the Brahmanical class of ritual specialists at the turn of the Common Era, which, over many centuries, and in piecemeal fashion, have insinuated purity norms into a variety of religious and political contexts throughout South Asia. In this chapter, I will challenge the notion that the process of Brahmanization in South Asia at the turn of the Common Era was the pervasive socio-religious juggernaut that it is often depicted as in Indological scholarship. In particular, I will argue that there was substantial resistance within the Buddhist establishment to the new ritual systems of the late ancient period, which was designed in Brahmanical circles of power to govern the relationship to the dead.

The first installation to be identified as an ancient Jewish ritual bath (miqweh) was discovered by Yigael Yadin at Masada in 1963–4, and consisted of a stepped pool connected to an adjacent pool via a hole in the wall shared by the two installations. Yadin identified one installation as the immersion pool of the miqweh, and the second as an ’ôṣār (lit., ‘reservoir’), used to ritually purify the water in the immersion pool. Yadin’s explanation regarding the functioning of this double-pool ritual bath has gone unchallenged since it was first suggested almost half a century ago, and set the stage for future identifications of ’ôṣār installations found adjacent to other Second Temple period ritual baths. The present paper argues that the ’ôṣār is an innovation of the modern period, and that the commonly accepted view that an ’ôṣār was employed in ritual baths dating to as early as the Second Temple period is no more than an unqualified anachronism.

"Tap to heal. Jesus of Nazareth and the bodily impurity in the Synoptic Gospels" -
This research investigates the position of Jesus of Nazareth about the bodily impurities in the traditions merged in the Synoptic Gospels. Particularly, it examines the attitude of the historical Jesus toward lepers and people with abnormal blood flow and during physical contact with dead bodies. The various readings given in the Synoptic Gospels about the same event, with a different emphasis on halachic implications, are the results of reflections by the early Christian communities.

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This book is the first monographic study of rules of Untouchability (asprśyatva) in the dharmaśāstra (Hindu Law tradition). From a limited number of rules in the oldest dharmasūtras the complex gradually proliferated during the literary periods of the metrical smrti works and the medieval commentaries and compendia to become a comprehensive system of precautionary measures against contact with a number of diverse groups and persons. The first part of the book traces this literary development but supplements the discussion with material from other literary genres such as the Vedic and post-Vedic literature, the Buddhist Pāli canon, Ārthaśāstra, the Epics and other narrative literature. The second part is a detailed study of Untouchability rules as recorded in Mādhavācārya’s mid-14th century commentary on the Parāśarasmrti, the Parāśaramādhavīya. Finally, the last part of the book offers an analysis of the total complex, which is seen as an exclusive set of rules demarcating an exclusive number of people and situations that cannot be explained by broader, inclusive notions of impurity alone.

The difficulties with the red cow ritual have long exercised readers of the book of Numbers. The ritual in Num 19:1–22 describes how cleansing from corpse impurity is to be effected. A red cow is burned in a manner carefully prescribed in order to produce ash. Mixed with water, the ash is then sprinkled upon the corpse-impure individual on the third and seventh day of his or her impurity. To some of the rabbis and many subsequent interpreters, the automatic efficacy of the rite appears to be tantamount to pagan magic. In addition, it has long been observed that the red cow ritual has a number of anomalies when compared to other rituals in the Old Testament. The red cow is designated a “purification offering” but is unlike the purification offerings described in Leviticus 4–5 or, indeed, any other sacrifice: the entire animal, including the blood, is burned outside the camp, and the goal of the ritual is the production of ash for the treatment of future and not past impurity. Finally, there is what Jacob Milgrom describes as the “paradox of the red cow”: the red cow ritual makes the pure impure and the impure pure.

There has been a good deal of empirical social scientific research which has addressed the theme of purity and has indicated its social importance. However, few theoretical resources are available to scholars which explicitly attempt to analyse purity, besides Mary Douglas’s structural-functionalist model. This model has many insights, but is not well-adapted to considering issues of subjectivity or social power in contemporary Western societies. This article will attempt to take some steps towards filling this gap. It will be claimed that, through the way they appeal to an imputed essence and origin, purity discourses are often complicit in the consecration and occlusion of relations of power and processes of subjectivation. The argument will focus in particular on the operation of purity discourses in the discursive construction and practical negotiation of female adolescence.

En varias culturas antiguas, emparentadas por el sustrato cultural indoeuropeo, se consideraban los fluidos corporales como altamente contaminantes en el aspecto ritual. Debido a esto, la mujer fue considerada como un agente potencialmente contaminante en la realización de los rituales. Este texto se interesa por analizar este aspecto en dos culturas: la atenas clásica y la india posvédica.

Impurity conveyed by fluids is a simbol and a tool for gender and caste discrimination in India. These fluids occupy asymmetric functions, in the creation of kinship and in gender relationships. Their circulation between bodies requires then a strict control; not prohibiting contact between castes, but ensuring a one-way transmission, linked to a relation of power and subordination. Taking our ethnographic data from a Himalayan valley as a point of departure, we will situate this “mechanic of fluids” with regard to some classical theories of impurity, offering our own renewed and current interpretation.

The interment of infants in ceramic receptacles was a fairly widespread funerary practice in southern Africa during the Iron Age. Using the rich source of ethnographic data on child-death and mortuary practices among Southeast Bantu speakers, we explore the cultural significance and symbolic meaning of an infant pot burial uncovered on Melora Saddle, an early nineteenth-century African farmer settlement on the Waterberg Plateau, Limpopo Province. The skeletal remains belong to a perinatal individual, aged between 34 weeks gestation and newborn. The short-necked jar was interred in an upright position either inside, or close to, a house. Ethnographic data show that a conceptual link was made between a woman’s reproductive capacity and the land’s fertility, as well as between potting and procreation. A close symbolic link existed between pots, wombs, mothers and their houses. Child-birth and child-death were fraught with ritual danger that had to be averted to ensure the well-being of...

The interment of infants in ceramic receptacles was a fairly widespread funerary practice in southern Africa during the Iron Age. Using the rich source of ethnographic data on child-death and mortuary practices among Southeast Bantu speakers, we explore the cultural significance and symbolic meaning of an infant pot burial uncovered on Melora Saddle, an early nineteenth-century African farmer settlement on the Waterberg Plateau, Limpopo Province. The skeletal remains belong to a perinatal individual, aged between 34 weeks gestation and newborn. The short-necked jar was interred in an upright position either inside, or close to, a house. Ethnographic data show that a conceptual link was made between a woman’s reproductive capacity and the land’s fertility, as well as between potting and procreation. A close symbolic link existed between pots, wombs, mothers and their houses. Child-birth and child-death were fraught with ritual danger that had to be averted to ensure the well-being of...

The interment of infants in ceramic receptacles was a fairly widespread funerary practice in southern Africa during the Iron Age. Using the rich source of ethnographic data on child-death and mortuary practices among Southeast Bantu speakers, we explore the cultural significance and symbolic meaning of an infant pot burial uncovered on Melora Saddle, an early nineteenth-century African farmer settlement on the Waterberg Plateau, Limpopo Province. The skeletal remains belong to a perinatal individual, aged between 34 weeks gestation and newborn. The short-necked jar was interred in an upright position either inside, or close to, a house. Ethnographic data show that a conceptual link was made between a woman’s reproductive capacity and the land’s fertility, as well as between potting and procreation. A close symbolic link existed between pots, wombs, mothers and their houses. Child-birth and child-death were fraught with ritual danger that had to be averted to ensure the well-being of...

This paper offers analyses of the "Red Heifer" known in Hebrew as the פרה אדומה (Parah Adumah) from a theological point of view. The sacred cow is burned and its ashes mixed with water to be sprinkled on the ritually impure in order to achieve purification. This paper also briefly discusses the history of the red cow and when it ceased to exist.