Purity and Impurity in Iron Age Israel

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Purification practices of ancient Israelite society before the introduction of mikva’ot remain largely unexplored. Recent excavations at Tel ‘Eton, in the southeastern Shephelah, yielded rich data on household life and practices in the tenth through the eighth centuries B.C.E. A large four-room house at Tel ‘Eton offers a rare glimpse of how Iron Age Israelites coped with the issues of ritual impurity, and it enables the author to reconstruct the purification ritual.

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Footnotes

1. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Avraham Faust, “Ideology in Stone: Understanding the Four-Room House,” BAR, 28:04.

2. Avraham Faust, “Early Israel: An Egalitarian Society?” BAR, 39:04.

3. Avraham Faust, “Pottery Talks: What Ceramics Tell Us About the Social World of Ancient Israel,” BAR, 30:02.

Endnotes

1.
See Avraham Faust and Hayah Katz, “The Archaeology of Purity and Impurity: A Case-Study from Tel ‘Eton, Israel,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27 (2017), pp. 1–27 (doi: 10.1017/S0959774316000494) for broader discussion and additional references. The study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation grant “The Birth, Life and Death of a Four-Room House at Tel ‘Eton” (no. 284/11).

2.
Ehud Netzer only quotes Moshe Weinfled’s suggestion that the rigid planning of the four-room house might have facilitated “the separation between purity and impurity—such as the avoidance of a woman during menstruation.” See Ehud Netzer, “Domestic Architecture in the Iron Age,” in Aharon Kempinski and Ronny Reich, eds., The Architecture of Ancient Israel from the Prehistoric to the Persian Period (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1992) p. 19, n. 24.

3.
Avraham Faust and Shlomo Bunimovitz, “The House and the World: The Israelite House as a Microcosm,” in Rainer Albertz et al., eds., Family and Household Religion (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), pp. 143–164.

4.
See Avraham Faust et al., “The Birth, Life and Death of an Iron Age House at Tel ‘Eton, Israel,” Levant 49.2 (2017), pp. 136–173.

5.
See Shulamit Geva, Hazor, Israel: An Urban Community of the 8th Century BCE, BAR International series S543 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1989), pp. 41–42; and Shimon Dar, “Hirbet Jemein—a First Temple Village in Western Samaria,” in Shimon Dar and Zeev Safrai, eds., Shomron Studies (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1986), pp. 13–73 [in Hebrew].

6.
In theory, the lack of vessels could indicate that the room was a stable for animals. However, this room was screened by an installation and a row of vessels in the courtyard that prevented easy access. While people could, carefully, pass the barrier and move toward the room, animals would most likely have broken the vessels. Furthermore, the unique surface at the entrance to the room would have been disturbed by animals. Additionally, the room itself lacked any sort of drainage, and the low frequency of phytoliths in it also runs against its identification as a stable. Finally, there were no installations that could feed the animals.