The Great Mikveh Debate - The BAS Library

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In a letter to the editor in Queries & Comments, BAR 18:06, Jerusalem guide Walter Zanger questions whether the installations found in the Jewish Quarter excavations directed by the late Nahman Avigad were really mikva’ot (ritual purification baths, singular mikveh), as they were denominated in an article on those excavations.a According to Zanger, only one of the water installations found in this excavation was really a mikveh. The others, he says, “weren’t mikva’ot at all!” (exclamation point in original). Zanger comes to this conclusion because only one of the water installations had a reserve or storage pool, known as […]

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Footnotes

Nitza Rosovsky, “A Thousand Years of History in Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter,” BAR 18:03. See also William S. La Sor, “Discovering What Jewish Mikva’ot Can Tell Us About Christian Baptism,” BAR 13:01, and “More on Mikva’ot”, Queries & Comments, BAR 13:04, Ronny Reich (letter).

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era), used by this author, are the alternate designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D. often used in scholarly literature.