The main discrepancy between the Qumranic purity legislation and the rabbinic purity legislation, which led various scholars to characterize the Qumranic system as much more stringent and harsh than the rabbinic system,44 has to do not with the sources of impurity themselves but mainly with the question of what qualifies as one of these sources of impurity and what does not. In general, rabbinic legislation tends to impose various restrictions and limitations on what can “count” as a source of impurity and what can contract impurity, whereas the Qumranic approach is on the whole much more inclusive and does not engage in the subcategorizing and classifying of potential sources in the same way that the rabbis do. To take a few notable examples: the rabbis distinguish between different kinds of genital bleeding and determine that some sorts of blood constitute sources of impurity and some do not, whereas no such distinction is traceable in Qumranic texts;45 the rabbis distinguish between objects and materials that can contract impurity and objects and materials that cannot, determining among other things that stones and objects that are connected to the ground are not susceptible to impurity, whereas the Qumranic legislation mentions both stone objects and houses as requiring purification;46 the rabbis do not consider a dead fetus to be a source of impurity as long as it is in its mother’s womb, whereas in Qumran a dead fetus is regarded like any other corpse;47 and many other similar examples can be found. As Vered Noam noted, the difference between the Qumranic approach and the rabbinic approach should not be understood in terms of stringency and leniency, but rather in terms of more straightforward and inclusive readings of the biblical texts as opposed to more restrictive and scrutinizing readings of these texts.48 To a great extent, my analysis in this book is concerned exactly with those restrictive readings introduced by the rabbis, and with the principles that guided them when excluding certain elements from the impurity system and including others. These restrictive principles have evidently not been at play in the work of earlier interpreters.
While the rabbinic purity legislation is often viewed as more “lenient” than the Qumranic legislation in terms of what constitutes a source of impurity, the rabbinic system is far more “stringent” as far as modes of transmission of impurity are concerned. That is to say, while in the rabbinic system fewer objects or persons can potentially function as sources of impurity, whatever does function as a source of impurity is much more potent in its impact on its environment than it is in the Qumranic system. As I will show in what follows, the Mishnah introduces new and unprecedented principles regarding the ways in which impurity is conveyed from the source to other people and things, ultimately suggesting that impurity can be contracted not only through direct contact with a source of impurity but also through various modes of indirect contact with a source of impurity. These new modes of transmission of impurity speak to the more general perspective of the rabbis on the presence and impact of impurity, which focuses not only on the source but also and perhaps especially on those who knowingly or unknowingly contract its impurity. It is in this perspective, I will propose, that the mishnaic purity discourse most radically diverges from the Qumranic discourse, and for that matter also from the biblical discourse.
The Extreme Transferability of Impurity in the Mishnah
The biblical impurity system essentially consists of two kinds of participants: primary sources of impurity, in which impurity is either an intrinsic quality or a result of a certain bodily condition, and secondary sources of impurity, which contracted impurity from primary sources. Since the sources of impurity in the Priestly Code are quite limited in number, and their effect normally extends only to whatever has direct contact with them, in the picture that emerges from the Priestly Code impurity generally transpires as a noticeable event. Of course, some events that bring about impurity are an inseparable and even recurring part of life (birth, death, menstruation, seminal emission), whereas others are more rare and crisis-like (scale disease, abnormal genital discharges); but all these events are discernible and traceable to a particular point in time. Whoever is impure, whether on account of experiencing the bodily conditions mentioned above or on account of having direct contact with a source of impurity, is presumably aware of whatever brought about this impurity and is capable of saying at what point, more or less, this impurity transpired. As common and natural as impurity may be in the world of the Hebrew Bible, it is restricted to very specific factors and to those in their immediate vicinity.49 Generally speaking, the basic view of the transpiration of impurity as a noticeable event, which impacts only the impure persons themselves and those in direct contact with them, is also dominant in the writings of Qumran. The Qumranic purity legislation focuses mainly on the ways in which impure persons and persons undergoing purification should take measures to distance themselves actively from the community, from sacred areas, from communal food, and so forth,50 and on their obligation to profess gratitude and humility when eventually purified.51
The picture in the mishnaic discourse is notably different. While the Mishnah dedicates considerable attention to questions of the diagnosis of impurity and to processes of purification, it does not introduce the concern with impurity as restricted only to the sources of impurity themselves or to those who come into direct contact with them, but rather presents it as the daily and ongoing concern of everyone, even of persons who are not currently impure or known to have had contact with a source of impurity. In other words, impurity in the Mishnah is approached not only as a noticeable event, but also, and perhaps much more prominently, as an ongoing reality.
This approach to impurity, which marks the mishnaic discourse of purity and impurity as significantly different from what preceded it, is deeply connected to several conceptual developments introduced in the Mishnah, which greatly increased the transferability of impurity, and thereby made it a much more pervasive and all-encompassing reality. While some of these conceptual developments can be traced back, in a nascent form, to the Second Temple period, the cumulative effect of all these developments taken together is a substantial expansion of the realm of impurity and the transformation of impurity into an ever-present factor in the rabbinic construction of everyday life. In what follows, I will examine three central manifestations of the increased transferability of impurity in rabbinic legislation: the graded system of impurity, principles of duplication of impurity, and expansion of biblical modes of transmission of impurity.
The Graded System of Impurity.As I mentioned, in the Priestly Code the only participants in the impurity system, apart from the primary sources of impurity, are those who have direct contact with these primary sources. In contrast, in the mishnaic system even persons and objects several times removed from the source can be affected in terms of impurity. For the rabbis, impurity does not end with whatever had direct contact with the source. Rather, even an item that did not touch the source directly but only touched something that touched the source (or even only something that touched something that touched the source) is affected by the source’s impurity, albeit in an attenuated manner. In order to understand this admittedly complex principle, which has no parallel in other codes of impurity,52 it is necessary to delve for a moment into the rabbinic understanding of the concept of impurity or, more accurately, into the rabbinic understanding of what is being transmitted from one entity to another in the course of the contraction of impurity.
The effect of impurity is depicted in the Mishnah in a highly physical or even mechanical manner, as if by a transmission of substance from one entity (human or nonhuman) to another entity through contact. The verb that is most commonly coupled with the word tum’a (impurity) in the Mishnah is qbl (to receive), the same verb used to describe, for instance, the pouring of liquid from one receptacle to the other, as if to suggest that the impure substance A transmits something to B.53 This “something” that is being transmitted is, in effect, the ability to make other things impure: in the Mishnah, to say that A makes B impure is to say that A gives B the capacity to affect C. Accordingly, the rabbis distinguish between making something ritually impure (letamē) and making something ritually disqualified (lifsol): to make something impure is to invest it with the ability to make others impure; to make something disqualified is only to prohibit