Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg

clearly show, the Priestly purity code underwent considerable development and broadening by different interpretive communities during the first centuries before and after the turn of the common era, in the course of which early Jewish legislators not only sought to make this code more comprehensive and cohesive, but also put forth new notions regarding the ways in which impurity is transmitted and regarding its impact on its surroundings.²⁵ Since this study ventures to examine how the rabbis transformed the notions of purity and impurity, and attempts to retrace the principles and views behind the Mishnah’s unique approach to this halakhic area, it is called for at this point to consider, albeit briefly, in which ways the Mishnah corresponds with earlier postbiblical modes of discourse on purity and impurity, and in which ways it presents something new and inimitable.

      Approaches to the Biblical Purity Code in the Qumran Scrolls and in Rabbinic Traditions

      Up until the discovery and publication of the Qumran Scrolls throughout the second half of the twentieth century, scholars were for the most part in the dark when attempting to identify and reconstruct the principles of purity and impurity, and the practices that these principles generated, that were at play among the Jewish societies of the Second Temple period. Aside from occasional references to matters of purity and impurity in apocryphal books, in the writings of Josephus and Philo, and in the New Testament, the main source through which scholars tried to reconstruct the “purity world” of this period was the rabbinic corpus, the earliest components of which were compiled over a century after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E.²⁶ Since it is highly debatable to what extent practices and ideas described or referenced in rabbinic texts can be projected onto earlier periods, it is quite difficult to determine with certainty which of the elements of the rabbinic purity legislation are unique to the circles of the rabbis (or the protorabbis), and which of these elements reflect more widely accepted views and modes of conduct regarding purity and impurity that prevailed in different Jewish circles in the Second Temple period. However, the vast body of writings found in Qumran, in which the topic of purity and impurity is remarkably prevalent, allowed scholars over the last several decades to reconstruct a much fuller picture of the perceptions and practices of purity and impurity in early Jewish communities around the turn of the Common Era. Thanks to the extensive and thorough work done to recover and explain the purity legislation of the Qumran Scrolls, we are in a much better position to examine the rabbinic interpretive and legislative approaches to purity against the cultural and hermeneutic background in which these approaches emerged.

      In what follows, I consider, very generally and very briefly, the central correspondences and divergences between the purity discourse in the Mishnah and the purity discourse in Qumran.²⁷ My purpose, to be sure, is not to compare the details of specific purity laws as they are presented in Qumranic or rabbinic writings: such systematic comparison is well beyond the scope and interest of this study, and can be found in several different studies dedicated mainly or exclusively to this purpose.²⁸ Rather, my purpose is to point out how the topic of purity and impurity is approached in these two corpora and through what perspectives it is being considered: what kind of interpretive and legislative moves vis-à-vis the biblical purity code are at play in these corpora; what, if anything, is added by them to the biblical scheme; and most importantly, what the focal points on which the discourse of purity and impurity is centered are. As I will argue, while Qumranic and rabbinic texts often display similar or even identical legislative moves, the lens through which the world of impurity is presented and discussed in these two corpora is fundamentally different.

      The most notable similarity between the purity legislation in Qumran and in rabbinic literature lies in the interpretive method that clearly forms the infrastructure of both corpora, a method that Jacob Milgrom aptly titled “homogenization,” that is, a systematic attempt to deduce the workings of one source of impurity from the workings of another source of impurity.²⁹ To take a simple example, the Priestly text never mentions explicitly in which way a woman who experiences a genital discharge is to purify herself after this discharge is over; it does mention, however, regarding other cases of bodily impurity, that the person in question must wash in water in order to be purified. Guided by a working assumption of overall congruity within the biblical system, both rabbinic texts and Qumranic texts take for granted that the prescribed form of purification for all sources of impurity, without exception, is immersion in water.³⁰ Similarly, both rabbinic and Qumranic texts indicate that the impurity of a person with scale disease, whose mode of transmission of impurity is not specified in the Priestly Code, is transmitted in the same ways as the impurity of persons with genital discharges.³¹ It is difficult to determine whether these “homogenizing” readings are rooted in a common interpretive tradition or emerged independently in both corpora as a result of the application of a similar method, but such readings certainly stand out as part of the shared discourse of impurity in early Judaism.³²

      To be sure, the process of homogenization is not always applied to the same biblical texts and does not always yield identical results across the two corpora, and there are multiple differences in various details between Qumran laws and rabbinic laws. For example, whereas the rabbis establish congruity between the impurity of a person with scale disease and a corpse, and thus determine that an afflicted person renders the house into which he or she enters impure in the same way that a corpse renders the space in which it is housed impure, no such ruling regarding a person with scale disease can be found in Qumran.³³ On the other end, several Qumranic texts enhance the impurity of a man who has had a seminal emission and make it both longer and transferrable, like the impurity brought about by other genital discharges, whereas the rabbis regard this form of impurity as very minor and essentially without impact on its surroundings.³⁴ To take one last example, several Qumranic texts seem to suggest, at least according to some scholars, that the mixture of purifying water (mei hattat), which according to the Priestly Code is used only in the case of corpse impurity, is to be used for other impurities as well, an idea that has no trace in rabbinic literature.³⁵ These few examples suffice to illustrate, I believe, that the enterprise of systematizing the biblical laws of purity and impurity so as to fill lacunae and to establish greater coherence among these laws was a common enterprise in early Judaism, even if it was applied by different interpretive communities in different ways and in different cases.

      Neither the Qumranic nor the rabbinic purity legislation modifies or alters the Priestly list of impurity sources in any significant way, and both essentially remain bound by the biblical scheme that includes only dead creatures, persons with genital discharges or scale disease, certain impure substances, and afflicted houses or garments as sources of impurity. The one source of impurity that both of these corpora do effectively add to the list of sources of impurity is outsiders, which in the rabbinic corpus pertains to non-Jews,³⁶ and in the corpus of Qumran apparently includes both non-Jews and persons who are not members of the community.³⁷ This addition to the biblical list of sources of impurity in both corpora speaks to the prevalence of the notion of outsiders as contaminating in the Second Temple period,³⁸ and reflects the shared cultural heritage of both the creators of the Qumranic texts and the early rabbis. However, it should be noted that the rabbis, as I will discuss at length in the fifth chapter, make a point of distinguishing the impurity of Gentiles, which they consider to be only statutory, from the biblical forms of impurity and introduce the impurity of Gentiles through analogy to one of the existing forms of ritual purity (namely, the impurity of genital discharges).³⁹ In other words, the rabbis are careful to indicate that Gentiles can be considered sources of ritual impurity only insofar as they are subsumed under one of the established Priestly categories of impurity. In contrast, the use of the terms pure and impure in Qumranic texts is much more liberal than it is in rabbinic texts, and the Qumranic authors (much like other authors in the Second Temple period) are not hesitant to use the language of purity and impurity even when referring to matters beyond the Priestly Code of ritual impurity. The frequent use of themes of purity and impurity in discussions of sin and moral atrocity in Qumran led several scholars to the conclusion that in Qumran sin was considered a source of physical-ritual impurity, and that unlike in rabbinic literature, moral and ritual impurity were not distinguished from each other by Qumranic authors.⁴⁰ Here I tend to agree with Martha Himmelfarb,⁴¹ who showed that the conflation of impurity and sin in Qumranic texts is mainly evocative and rhetorical,