As I will show throughout the book, while the rabbis adhere to the basic schemes of purity and impurity put forth in the Priestly Code, and do not add any new sources of impurity to the biblical system, they suggest an array of unprecedented principles regarding the contraction, conveyance, and management of impurity, as well as sets of practices that derive from these principles. The purpose of this study is to trace the new principles that the rabbis introduced to the biblical system of purity and impurity, and to reconstruct and explain the conceptual framework that brought them about. I will argue that a central dimension of the rabbinic reconstruction of the purity system is unparalleled attention to questions of subjectivity, and more specifically, to the ways in which persons relate to themselves, to their bodies, and to their material surroundings. Whereas in the Bible and in Second Temple literature the dominant focal points of the discourse on purity and impurity are the sancta and the Temple,12 and by extension the camp, the city, and the community insofar as those bear a sanctity of their own,13 the Mishnah’s Order of Purities introduces the self, the individual subject of the law, as a new focal point.14 This is not to say that the Temple or the community are of no interest to the rabbis, but it is to say that the discourse on these topics in the context of purity and impurity is reoriented toward the self, the agent whose body (as well as property, which, as I will argue, functions in the Mishnah as part of one’s extended body) goes through the vicissitudes of purity and impurity.
The rabbinic shift of focus from the Temple to the self seems, on the face of it, to lend itself readily to the prevalent view that the Mishnah is in essence a response to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and, later on, to the demolition and resettlement of Jerusalem and its region following the Bar Kokhva revolt in 132–135 C.E. Various scholars hold the view that the Mishnah and the rabbinic enterprise more broadly were devised in an attempt to provide viable substitutes to the destroyed Temple, and thereby to allow Jewish life to persist in a new, durable configuration under the new circumstances.15 Within this paradigm, it seems almost warranted to assume that the emergence of the self as a critical focal point of the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity is a facet of the rabbinic effort to replace Temple-based forms of piety with Temple-less forms of piety. My analysis in this study, however, does not subscribe to this paradigm, and does not examine the rabbinic discourse of purity and impurity through the lens of the destruction of the Temple, for the simple reason that there are no real grounds for identifying a break between perceptions and practices of purity that prevailed during the time of the Temple and perceptions and practices of purity that prevailed after its destruction. As I will argue in the first chapter, it is evident that purity was pursued beyond the Temple and beyond Jerusalem even while the Temple was still functioning, and it is also quite evident that purity-related practices were still prevalent in Palestine for decades after the destruction of the Temple (with the obvious exception of elements that could only take place in the Temple, such as purificatory sacrifices). In addition, some of the central legal innovations that stand at the core of the rabbinic transformation of the biblical impurity system clearly date back to the first century C.E. or even earlier. The Mishnah’s discourse of purity and impurity should be understood, I contend, not as a “response” to specific historical crises, but as the result of a very gradual evolvement and change of social, intellectual, and ideological concerns and interests that converged in the encounter between the rabbis, the traditions they interpreted, and the greater cultural context in which this interpretation was taking place.
With this view of the mishnaic discourse of purity and impurity as a site in which biblical institutions are transformed and reshaped and cultural modes of engagement with notions of body and self are negotiated, this book engages in conversation with three central fields of interest: purity in ancient Judaism, the body in rabbinic culture, and the self in antiquity. However, since the topic of this book is the reinterpretation and reinvention of an inherited ritual language in a changing world, it invites to this conversation a wide variety of scholars, students, and interested readers who are fascinated by the relations between tradition and innovation in religious communities.
PURITY IN ANCIENT JUDAISM
The constitutive corpus for the discourse of ritual purity and impurity in ancient Judaism is chapters 11–15 in the book of Leviticus and chapter 19 in the book of Numbers. These chapters, which discuss a number of creatures, substances, and bodily conditions that are considered sources of impurity and are thus proscribed in different ways, have elicited ongoing interest among traditional and modern scholars alike. Whereas scholars of the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East are mainly interested in deciphering the biblical purity laws in terms of their meaning or origin, scholars of postbiblical Judaism are concerned with the question of how the biblical purity system was applied and interpreted in different social and religious contexts. The working assumption that guides studies of the latter interest, which includes this book, is that in postbiblical ancient Judaism the biblical purity system itself is not negotiable, and its particular details are a given; the question is what, if anything, is done with this system. While the topic of purity in postbiblical Judaism has received some scholarly attention over the past century, the last two decades can be described as a time of an unprecedented boom of interest in this topic.16 Within this fairly recent abundance of studies, one can identify two central modes of engagement with the topic, which I will define here as sociohistorical and textual-conceptual.
Studies conducted with a sociohistorical orientation are concerned with questions of actual observance of purity laws in ancient Jewish societies, namely, how many people observed these laws, which laws exactly were observed, how they were observed by different groups, what were the different levels of observance during different periods, and so forth.17 Many of these studies focus mainly on the two centuries before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, a period from which there is relatively abundant evidence, and use rabbinic sources primarily to reconstruct a historical account of the prerabbinic period. This tendency not only is a result of the relative paucity of archeological and nonrabbinic textual evidence from the time after the destruction of the Temple, but also often stems from the prevalent assumption that after the destruction of the Temple the observance of ritual purity was, on the whole, irrelevant and unattainable (except for little “pockets” of observance, like the laws of menstrual purity or the laws of corpse impurity that pertain to priests).18 Guided by this assumption, Jacob Neusner dedicated the twenty-two volumes of his History of the Mishnaic Laws of Purities to arguing that, after the destruction of the Temple, purity turned from an everyday concern, centered on eating practices, to an abstract notion with no bearing on everyday life that the rabbis utilized to develop their inquiry of reality.19 More recent scholarship, however, which relies both on careful textual analysis and on archeological evidence,20 persuasively shows that while some purity laws could obviously not be observed in the absence of a Temple (mainly laws that require sacrifices as part of the purification process), various purity-related practices, most notably practices pertaining to the preparation and consumption of food, were maintained throughout the mishnaic period, although they had apparently been in rapid decline as of the second half of the second century C.E.21
In contrast to sociohistorical studies, the main purpose of textual-conceptual studies is to examine how notions of purity and impurity are interpreted in different ancient Jewish texts. The purpose of such studies is not to uncover what different Jewish groups did, but how these groups perceived different aspects of the concepts of purity and impurity: which cosmic powers they stood for, what their moral and theological undertones were, what social and communal ideologies they served, and so forth. The main characteristic of existing textual-conceptual studies of this sort is their clear comparative orientation and diachronic organization, since their central undertaking is to examine several different corpora