They’re Not Ritual Baths - The BAS Library
Login
Home > Magazines > BAR > July/August 2000
The Pools of Sepphoris: Ritual Baths or Bathtubs?

They’re Not Ritual Baths

By Hanan Eshel

One sure sign that religiously observant Jews inhabited a site from the turn of the era is the presence of ritual immersion pools (mikva’ot; singular, mikveh).

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1.

Richard A. Batey, “Sepphoris—An Urban Portrait of Jesus,” BAR 18:03.

Endnotes

1.

See, for example, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Ancient Near East, s.v. “Sepphoris.”

2.

Yigael Yadin,Masada: Herod’s Fortress and the Zealot’s Last Stand (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), pp. 164–167.

3.

Ronny Reich, “Mishnah, Sheqalim 8:2 and the Archaeological Evidence,” in Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period: Abraham Schalit Memorial Volume, ed. Aaron Oppenheimer, Uriel Rappaport and Menachem Stern (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1980), pp. 225–256 (in Hebrew); and “A Miqweh at al Isawiya near Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 34 (1984), pp. 220–223.

4.

Mishnah, Sheqalim 8.2; see Saul Lieberman, “Notes,” P’raqim 1 (1967–1968), pp. 97–98 (in Hebrew); Bargil Pixner, “An Essene Quarter on Mount Zion,” in Studia Hierosolymitana, vol. 1, Archaeological Studies (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing, 1976), pp. 270–271.

5.

See Reich, “Miqvaot (Jewish Ritual Immersion Baths) in Eretz-Israel in the Second Temple and the Mishnah and Talmudic Periods” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem, 1990); and “The Great Mikveh Debate,” BAR 19:02.

6.

It is possible that there is one—as yet unpublished—exception.

7.

See Amos Kloner, “Maresha,” Qadmoniot 24 (1991), p. 81 (in Hebrew); Martha S. Joukouwsky, ed., The Heritage of Tyre (Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 1992), p. 2.