Ritual Purity

Shows how the canonical Nativity Gospels can easily be harmonized. And how the Blessed Virgin Mary may have anointed Jesus' head in Bethany, as consent to his sacrificial death in Jerusalem. This last issue is elaborated further and stronger in my later article "The Virgin Mary anointed her Son the Christ and for burial in Bethany - Coredemptrix" https://www.academia.edu/26377098/The_Virgin_Mary_anointed_her_Son_the_Christ_and_for_burial_in_Bethany_Coredemptrix .

Over the past fifty years, archaeological excavations in Israel have unearthed about half a dozen ancient synagogues that were in use at different points in time between the first century BCE through the outbreak of the Bar-Kochba rebellion early in the second century of the Common Era.  In close proximity to each of these synagogues, a mikveh (ritual bath) has been discovered.  In contrast, no mikvaot have been discovered adjacent to any of the dozens of later synagogues that have been excavated and studied, with only one or two possible exceptions. 
At this point it is impossible to determine exactly when mikvaot ceased to be built in connection with synagogues, as the archaeological record reports very little about synagogues of the late second - early third century CE.  From an archaeological perspective, it is clear that at least from the second half of the third century, synagogues began to be built without regard for proximity to mikvaot.
Talmudic sources make no mention of a requirement to build mikvaot adjacent to synagogues. To date, no satisfactory explanation has been given for the evident connection between the synagogue and the mikveh in the early period, and the disappearance of such a connection in later periods of synagogue history. The objective of this paper is to present and explore a possible interpretation of this puzzling phenomenon.
  During the Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, a rabbinical enactment was in effect requiring mikveh ablutions prior to engagement in Torah study and prayer for individuals who had experienced seminal emission. Careful study of the Talmudic sources reveals that this enactment was nullified early in the Amoraic Period, sometime during the second quarter of the third century CE.
It would appear that the mikvaot built adjacent to the earlier synagogues were intended for this precise function, serving visitors to the synagogue who required ritual ablutions prior to Torah study and prayer.  Once the rabbinical enactment regarding these ablutions was nullified, there was no longer need for such mikvaot, and hence the absence of mikvaot in proximity to the later synagogues.

השאיפה לטהרה עמדה במוקד התרבות הדתית של יהודי העת העתיקה ועיצבה את תמונת עולמם, אורחות חייהם ויחסיהם החברתיים. קבוצות שונות הציעו דרכים למימוש חיי טהרה וכרכו בה גאולה עצמית ותיקון קוסמי.


הספר טהרה וקהילה בעת העתיקה: מסורות ההלכה בין יהדות בית שני למשנה מציע תיאור מקיף של תחום הטהרה, אופייה ותכליתה בעולמם של יהודי בית שני בכלל, ובפרט בתורתם של הפרושים. על רקע תפיסות מתחרות, המופיעות בספרות קומראן ובברית החדשה, הציעו הפרושים חלופה משלהם לחיי טהרה שבה נכרכו מסורת בדלנית ואידאולוגיה חברתית. מקורות התקופה משרטטים אורח חיים מעורר מחלוקת הממוקד בהגנה על הגוף במקום על הקודש, ובשליטה על הטומאה במקום שעבוד לעוצמתה הקוסמית. מדיניות הפרושים הוסיפה ועיצבה את דמותן של ההלכה והקהילה גם לאחר החורבן, ותורתם הניחה את היסודות לפעילותם של התנאים בתוך הקשרים חברתיים משתנים. ניתוח ביקורתי של תולדות מסורות ההלכה בתחום הטהרה במשנה ובתוספתא חושף את תהליכי התפרקותה של התרבות הדתית הקדומה והתגבשותה של תורת החכמים.

The concern for purity shaped Second Temple Judaism, and its significance expanded far beyond the limited realm of the Temple. The fear of impurity shaped daily conduct, stood at the heart of ideological disputes and formed the contours of Jewish society. The question how to ensure ritual and moral purity was of cosmic dimensions, and therefore determined the dividing lines between the main parties of Jewish society in Palestine. The Qumran sect developed the notion of the defiling sin, and Jesus was viewed by his followers as the ultimate purifier. Against these alternatives, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the purity policy in the teachings of the dominant Pharisees. Early rabbinic traditions alongside anti-pharisaic sources uncover a controversial policy focused on the body and not on the purity of the Temple. They provided purification to wider social circles, while preserving its role in maintaining their own status. The book further demonstrates the fundamental change of religious life and social practices from the Second Temple period through the rise of the rabbinic movement, which offered a new version of ritual purity and community. A close analysis of the halakhic traditions in rabbinic literature reveals the gradual disintegration of the ancient religious culture and the emergence of the rabbinic culture within new social contexts.

The rabbinic halakhic system, with its many facets and the literary works that comprise it, reflects a new Jewish culture, almost completely distinct in its halakhic content and scope from the biblical and postbiblical culture that preceded it. The paper reviews the implications of Qumranic legislation, as a way station between the Bible and the Mishnah, for understanding how the "rabbinic revolution” was charted, its methods set up, and its principles established.

Modern psychological research has devoted considerable attention to physiological disgust and “moral” disgust, finding both similarities and significant differences between them. Of particular interest is the plausible evolutionary hypothesis that physiological disgust provides the phylogenetic basis for social or moral disgust. To a considerable extent, these distinctions are comparable to the different categories of pollution which have been identified in the Hebrew Bible, specifically the distinction between so-called “ritual” and “moral” impurities. It will be argued that the evolutionary framework employed for the study of disgust can shed light on the role of pollution beliefs in shaping moral discourse in ancient Israel. This evolutionary perspective will serve as the basis for a renewed examination of the social implications of purity, duly stressed in Mary Douglas’ influential treatise Purity and Danger (1966). However, in contrast with Douglas’ symbolic approach to pollution, which presupposed a top-down process rooted in disembodied rationality, this paper outlines a bottom-up account grounded in physiological concerns related to disgust and infectious disease. This embodied framework enables the identification of two distinct mechanisms by which pollution can take on broader socio-moral implications, specifically those embedded in purity practices themselves and those emerging from the rhetorical extensions of purity language. The article concludes with discussion of how this historical evidence can encourage a reconsideration of some prevalent assumptions in modern experimental research of moral disgust.
online: http://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/JCH/article/view/30290
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First published in 1988, this volume redefined the anthropological study of menstrual customs. Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, it challenged the previously widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination that underlay it. Offering feminist perspectives on comparative gender politics and symbolism, the book has interested students and scholars in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems. Originally listed as a “Notable” book in Choice, it later won the first Most Enduring Edited Collection Prize, awarded by the Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction (a unit of the American Anthropological Association.). The book continues to be taught regularly around the world.

This article challenges the common tendency in modern research to treat impurity as a religious phenomenon divorced from mundane concerns. Employing the cross-cultural psychological notion of “contagion,” this investigation examines the usage of terms for pollution and purity in Hittite and Akkadian as they relate to distinct domains of human experience, specifically: uncleanness, infection and transgression. Special attention is given to the use of these terms in reference to infectious disease. This analysis demonstrates the real-world experiential basis for notions of impurity and also provides a new perspective to shed light on the peculiarities of each culture (e.g. the absence of an Akkadian term for “pollution”). The article concludes with a detailed excurses on the etymology of Akkadian musukku and its relation to Sumerian (m)uzug.

The Islamic laws pertaining to mustḥāḍa—women who have dysfunctional uterine bleeding (istiḥāḍa)—have been overlooked in the research literature. This article reopens the research discourse on this topic by discussing two related questions: may a mustḥāḍa perform religious obligations and may she have sexual intercourse? The questions are shown to be somewhat related. It is found that jurists conceded the right of a mustḥāḍa to pray but disagreed about why—implying, contrary to previous scholarship, that Islam accommodates different levels of ritual impurity—and that they held divergent views on her having intercourse. By probing and investigating Islamic legal sources, it is shown that research assertions about istiḥāḍa thus far require circumscription and reexamination.

Purity rules and discourses are present in all three Abrahamic religions, serving as a medium in structuring their moral, social and ritual worlds and in constructing the holiness of the religious community, religious spaces and the individual body. Purity and defilement govern the management of the individual body versus the community: in eating, defecation, illness, sexual relations, birth and death, in attitudes towards foreigners and heretics, and in the understanding of the demonic. However, ritual and moral purity were used in different ways by the various traditions. Thus while in Judaism and Islam ritual purity is the main medium, in Christianity ritual purity is typically overlaid by moral purity discourse

The West has a history of oppression and vilification of homosexuals based on a mixture of religious and cultural beliefs. But the Bible passages that actually condemn same-sex sexuality are few and should be interpreted based on ancient social patterns and beliefs. Here, a selection of ancient and biblical texts is examined using the conceptual pairs of purity/impurity, authority/subordination and honour/shame.

The book is in Swedish, but an English translation is planned. A few sample pages are uploaded.

Practically every culture distinguishes between clean and unclean things, actions, and people. This is true for simple hygiene as well as for ritual or
religious purity. While in most cultures both men and women can become polluted, impurity is more often associated with women, especially during menstruation. Consequently, restrictions on menstruating women were imposed in a vast number of societies—both ancient and modern—including ancient Israel, where the Bible regarded all bodily emissions as defi ling and women were regulated by the niddah laws.
Throughout history, various societies have developed different ways of separating the pure and the impure, usually by imposing restrictions on the movement and behavior of the impure. The question of impurity, therefore, has a spatial dimension, and rules governing impurity had to be formulated in relation to space. So how were women and their families expected to follow such restrictions within the specific conditions of their settlements and houses?
This paper analyses this question within the context of Iron Age Israel, and demonstrates how this society separated the pure and the impure within the domestic context.

Introduction to Messianic Judaism provides a description of what the Messianic Jewish community looks like today at its center and on its margins. The first section of the book traces the ecclesial contours of the community, providing a socio-historical and theological snapshot of the community's origins, where it is presently and where it is heading. Alongside these chapters, the book also includes a number of essays on biblical and theological issues central to the identity of Messianic Judaism. The twelve contributors to the first part of the book are recognized leaders in the Messianic Jewish community. They work with various organizations, including the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America, the International Alliance of Messianic Congregations and Synagogues, the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council, Tikkun International, Chosen People Ministries, Messianic Jewish Theological Institute, Israel College of the Bible and the New School for Jewish Studies. Fourteen scholars from a wide spectrum of Christian backgrounds have written essays for the second part of the book. Their participation signals a growing academic and ecclesial interest in Messianic Judaism. Since the 1970s, a sea change has taken place in New Testament studies that has far-reaching implications for how the church evaluates Messianic Judaism. A broad reassessment of the New Testament writers’ view of Judaism has occurred since the publication of E. P. Sanders’s seminal work Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), and this reevaluation continues unabated. The contributors to the second part of Introduction to Messianic Judaism draw from this recent scholarship and demonstrate how post-supersessionist interpretation of the New Testament results in readings of the biblical text that are consistent with Messianic Judaism. The final section of the book is written by Joel Willitts who provides a summary and synthesis of the essays, explaining how they shed light on the ecclesial context and biblical foundations of Messianic Judaism.

In his most recent book, Matthew Thiessen elegantly and efficiently closes the yawning gap between decades of Jewish Studies scholarship on ritual impurity and the attempt by New Testament scholars to characterize Jesus’s relationship to the purity beliefs and practices of his day. The result is a Jesus who makes both narrative and historical sense as a first century Jew for whom the ritual and cultic norms of the community are unquestioned axioms. Thiessen's work adds to a growing body of scholarship that aligns Jesus with Jewish groups known to have adopted a posture of metaphysical realism (or ontological “essentialism”) on a range of hotly debated topics in late Second Temple and early post-destruction Jewish society. Online version: http://enochseminar.org/review/20395

Scholars usually take for granted that the sectarian members of the Qumran movement ate their common meals in full purity at a level that is often compared to that of the priests serving in the temple. This assumption rests on the interpretation of hatohorah, “the purity,” as pertaining to common meals. But a careful study of a range of texts, including the important Tohorot A, leads to a more nuanced picture. Accordingly, it is important to distinguish between the common,
everyday meals of the movement and the special meals. Whereas a mild level of impurity of the participants was accepted at the ordinary type of communal meals, special meals required purity. Even at these pure meals, there were variations concerning the required level of purity
depending on the occasion.

In OT perspective, the high-handed sins of bloodshed, idolatry, and sexual immorality are most egregious for these three things also defile the land. Cleansing, however, is problematic; means available to people for removing geospatial defilement are not comprehensive. Nevertheless, several texts adopt ritual categories to hint that divine cleansing of land remains possible. Yet such means always entail significant human harm: banishment or death. A tension therefore remains in the apparent zero-sum game of (defiled) land versus (defiling) occupants. If YHWH is to have a people of his own, then what hope is there for the land?

The identification of deviant burials as those of ‘vampires’ is a feature of excavated skeletons from sites across Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as well as the Balkans. Based on a close reading of historic and folkloric sources researchers have sought to match features of excavated sites with narrative descriptions drawn from vampire legend and myth. This study critically reviews the recent claims based on sites in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Whilst it is found that there was a widespread belief in vampires across Europe, it is argued that it is difficult to make absolute claims for ‘vampire’ burials on archaeological grounds as in most cases there are alternate and equally compelling interpretations of the data.

KEYWORDS
ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, VAMPIRE, DEVIANT BURIAL, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH, FOLKLORE, PAGAN, BURIAL, WITCH, BALKANS, EASTERN EUROPE, CENTRAL EUROPE, SOUTHERN EUROPE, BULGARIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, POLAND, GREECE, ITALY, SLOVAKIA, LESBOS, VENICE, APOTROPAIC, VAMPIRIDZHIJA, PERPERIKON, SOZOPOL, PROSTEJOV, CELAKOVICE, DRAWSKO, GLIWICI, SOUTHWELL, KILTEASHEEN, LAZZARETTO NUOVO, NACHTZEHRER, KAMIEN POMORSKI

The concepts of purity and pollution were central to the maintenance of social boundaries in ancient Egyptian culture. Anthropological approaches, in particular the work of Mary Douglas, are useful in examining their impact on social structure and individual lived experience. Cleanliness and dirtiness were represented as defining characteristics of the ancient Egyptian elite and lower class. Dirty laborers were compared to animals, reinforcing the perception of the existing social order as natural. Even the process of cleaning itself could be presented as potentially polluting, when enacted by the lower class. The control of space and the body according to purity requirements were used to enforce social boundaries and restrict access. In the Middle Kingdom in particular, the introduction of literature, and innovations in iconography and scene-types depicted in tomb chapel decoration and tomb models may indicate new developments in society. Fear of pollution is particularly evident in the literary theme of “the reversal of order,” a nightmare vision of a world upturned, primarily the inversion of social status.

The present article explores the multileveled function of disgust in biblical purity discourse as an embodied emotion, a conceptual framework, and a rhetorical strategy. The methodological approach is broadly evolutionary (biopsychological) and cognitive-conceptual, including insights from neuroscience and linguistics (metaphor and blending theories). The texts referred to and analyzed represent a variety of genres (legal, narrative, prophetic) and are selected to illustrate different aspects and functions of disgust, ranging from ritual indexing and taboos, to moral indignation and general value judgments, to ostracism and ethnocentrism. The aim is to demonstrate how biological underpinnings and cultural constructions of disgust interact and thereby provide resources for a better understanding of impurity and disgust reflected in biblical texts. The argument builds on my previous studies on impurity and disgust and incorporates some of their analyses and conclusions.

This article focuses on John Zonaras’s treatise on nocturnal emissions, providing an annotated translation and introduction. It discusses Zonaras as an author, the addressees of his treatise, its content, and broader context, exploring in particular the competition for religious authority among monastic and secular clergy as a possible background. It argues that Zonaras’s attitude towards the purity of nocturnal emissions is comparable to his attitudes towards sexual intercourse within marriage. This means that although the treatise might have acted as a means to advance Zonaras’s position on religious authority, it was not merely a piece of polemical rhetoric but needs to be understood within his wider views on purity and sexuality.

This article investigates the conceptual background of the notion of corpse pollution as represented by the Priestly expression ṭāmēˀ la-nepeš. Contrary to the growing tendency to view it as a late introduction to Israelite religion, the analysis will situate corpse impurity in relation to broader biblical and West Semitic conceptions of the afterlife. This discussion will serve as the basis for the further question whether this type of pollution was related to a fear of ghosts.

The late Antique mosaic of Orpheus decorated a small room, approximately 18 m2 in area, connected with two even smaller ones, in 4 m2 and the other 2 m2 in area, belonging most likely to a small funerary chapel (or tomb) discovered in the ancient necropolis by the Damascene Gate in Jerusalem; it was discovered in 1901 by H. Vincent.
The author proposes a new interpretation of the iconographic program of the Orpheus myth used by wealthy Christians in a sepulchral context (see Olszewski M.T. «Orphée endeuillé de la mosaïque funéraire de Jérusalem», in Rey Mimoso-Ruiz, B. ed., Actes du colloque «Orphée entre Soleil et ombre», à l’Institut Catholique de Toulouse du 16 au 17 novembre 2007, Inter Lignes, numéros spécial – mars 2008, pp. 205-214, 226). He also proposes a new interpretation of the role Orpheus played in Roman funerary art, concentrating on the importance of the play on words and the visual and textual punning that was popular in ancient art and especially in funerary art. He rejects the popular interpretation of Orpheus as Christ in the Roman catacombs and proposes to interpret the image as that of Orpheus, bard of the departed souls, without any ahistorical connection with Christ. The program of the mosaic from Jerusalem is thus explained as a play on the words Orpheus-orphanos and Chiron (Chi-Rho) and Pan [Παν(τοκράτωρ)].The frequently used Christian funerary formula of resting in peace, Christ or the Lord corresponds
perfectly with the mood created around the mythical bard.
Orpheus’ universal role as singer and musician moving even the most stony of hearts, extolling the beloved departed, is absolutely justified in the context of a 6th-century Christian tomb. Orpheus is a popular and neutral figure, meaning that in effect it does not constitute a threat to Christian theology and can be tolerated by the educated Christians of Jerusalem.

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). I argue that the ancient Israelites generally had a positive attitude toward sex and didn't limit it to procreation. But around the time of the first Christians, there was one sect, the Essenes, which limited all sexual activity to procreation. Whether or not there was a direct connection, the Christians adopted the same view, to the point that they prized celibacy and virginity above all. Augustine then codified this position by calling sex "original sin," but he did this by making two serious mistakes. Christians have suffered for it ever since, and are only now openly accepting sex without procreation and even without marriage.

Although miqwa’ot and chalkstone vessels have been found throughout Israel, the unparalleled number of such finds at Jerusalem has conventionally been explained in terms of the special demands of the Temple cult and of the city’s priestly residents. In light of a growing number of archaeological discoveries from the past number of years, however, the conception that Jerusalem and its Temple served as focal points of ritual purity observance deserves to be significantly reevaluated. The new data indicate that regular, widespread use of ritual baths and chalkstone vessels was not at all unique to Jerusalem or the priesthood, but rather was commonplace to a comparable degree in Jewish society throughout early Roman Judea. Jews everywhere throughout the country strove on a regular basis to maintain the purity of their bodies, clothing, utensils, food, and drink, and there is no reason to suppose that in doing so they somehow had the Temple in mind. Most Jews living at this time would probably have understood the pentateuchal purity regulations as prescribing that ritual purity be maintained on a regular basis in ordinary, everyday life – without specific regard to the Temple or its cult. This new understanding encourages us to reinterpret the archaeological finds from Jerusalem as reflecting an important facet of prevailing common culture rather than as stemming from the unique sanctity of Jerusalem, the Temple, or its priests.

This entry in the Lexham Theological Wordbook explores the concept of "baptism" in the HB and NT. There is a "concept summary", "theological overview", and "lexical information" on two Hebrew and eight Greek terms. This entry is intended to be read in conjunction with the entry on "clean and unclean" by the same author in the same work.

In the mid-90s, Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and the Iranian Ayatollah Khamene’i both banned bloody forms of self-flagellation such as tatbir (cutting the forehead with a sword), calling them backward and un-Islamic. They argued that Shi‘a Muslims ought to imitate Husayn by actively fighting against oppressors rather than passively mourning Husayn’s martyrdom. This prohibition has not been unanimously applied in all Muslim
countries, including Syria, where such practices persisted until the Arab Spring (when virtually all Shi‘a Muslims left the shrine-town where these practices were performed). By closely reading the linguistic, conceptual, and juridical discourses that circulated in Syria in order to justify this position, the paper shows that the performers of tatbir conceived of these rituals in revolutionary, rather than reactionary, terms. By examining the performance and reception of flagellation processions in terms of differing modalities of affect, the paper opens up spaces for rethinking ‘revolution’ and ‘redemption’ in contemporary Twelver Shi‘ism.

In a much-publicized paper, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) reported evidence that feelings of moral cleanliness are grounded in feelings of physical cleanliness: a threat to people’s moral purity leads them to seek, literally, to cleanse themselves. In an attempt to replicate and build upon these findings, we conducted a pilot study in which we unexpectedly failed to replicate the original results from the second study of Zhong and Liljenquist’s report. To investigate the source of this issue, we conducted a series of direct replications of Study 2 as reported in Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). We used the authors’ original materials and methods; we investigated samples that were more representative of the general population than in the original experiments; we investigated samples from different countries and cultures; and we substantially increased the power of our statistical tests. Nevertheless, we still failed to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist’s initial reported findings. Our research suggests that more work is needed to clarify the scope and robustness of the original results.

Mary Douglas is a prominent figure in the pantheon of religious studies, but the relevance of Douglas's influential theories about ritual pollution for Classical Indian Buddhism, a literate tradition that is sometimes critical of ritual and often explicitly distances itself from physicalized interpretations of bodily impurity, is not obvious. In fact, students of Classical Indian Buddhism have often argued that ideas about ritual impurity, including blood taboos, hold no place of importance in that tradition. This article brings together materials from the Indian Buddhist tradition and Douglas's theories of pollution in society to fulfill the dual purpose of testing Douglas's theory in a new arena and better articulating and explaining Indian Buddhist notions of female impurity.

How do we become pure? This question haunts every genuine spiritual aspirant. This small book addresses this vital question in great detail. This book is an English translation of the original Kannada booklet called 'Pavitrata svarupini Sri Sharada Maate' by Revered Swami Purushottamanandaji Maharaj

Throughout history, the Druids have always been seen as sorcerers who had a strong bond with nature. Ancestral knowledge holders within Celtic society, directed all religious activity as the highest authority linked to the gods, practiced human sacrifices and festivals organized as Imbolc, Beltaine, Lugnasad or Samain, etc.. all aspects of which are discussed in this article.

Ritual purity was a major goal of cultic activities in the Mediterranean world, but in a number of contexts, purity was also considered a desirable condition regardless of cultic participation. This chapter discusses the concept of purity and purification from phenomenological, linguistic, and ritual perspectives. Attention is given to the variegated use of purity terminology and to the use of cognitive metaphor and conceptual blending theories to understand and explain the broad and common usage of purity-related language in various domains. The chapter surveys and analyzes a limited selection of purification rites from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Israel, Greece, and Rome. This is done both with a view to historical development, influence, and interaction, and with the help of theorizing on ritual efficacy and social effects of purity codes. Particular attention is given to purifications with water, especially in Second Temple Judaism, as these are crucial to the further development of water rites in emerging Christianity.