Watertight and Rock Solid: Stepped Pools and Chalk Vessels as Expressions of Jewish Ritual Purity - The BAS Library
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Watertight and Rock Solid: Stepped Pools and Chalk Vessels as Expressions of Jewish Ritual Purity

By Yonatan Adler

Stepped pools and chalk vessels in Roman Palestine are best interpreted as a reflection of Jewish concerns over the Pentateuchal ritual purity laws. Although this notion has been challenged, there is enough evidence to prove the religious motivation of the two archaeological phenomena.

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Footnotes

1. Cecilia Wassén, “Stepped Pools and Stone Vessels: Rethinking Jewish Purity Practices in Palestine,” BAR, July/August/September/October 2019.

2. Ronny Reich, “The Great Mikveh Debate,” BAR, March/April 1993.

3. Hanan Eshel, “The Pools of Sepphoris: Ritual Baths or Bathtubs? They’re Not Ritual Baths,” BAR, July/August 2000. See also Eric M. Meyer’s response (in the same issue): “Yes, They Are.”

4. Ronny Reich, “They Are Ritual Baths,” BAR, March/April 2002.

5. See Marcela Zapata-Meza and Rosaura Sanz-Rincón, “Excavating Mary Magdalene’s Hometown,” BAR, May/June 2017.

6. See Yitzhak Magen, “Ancient Israel’s Stone Age: Purity in Second Temple Times,” BAR, September/October 1998.

Endnotes

1.
Benjamin G. Wright, “Jewish Ritual Baths—Interpreting the Digs and the Texts: Some Issues in the Social History of Second Temple Judaism”, in Neil Asher Silberman and David Small, eds., The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 190–214.

2.
Stuart S. Miller, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity Among the Jews of Roman Galilee (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015), pp. 50–55.

3.
See Yitzhak Magen, The Stone Vessel Industry in the Second Temple Period: Excavations at Ḥizma and the Jerusalem Temple Mount (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2002), pp. 138–147 (originally published in Hebrew, in 1988).

4.
Shimon Gibson, “Stone Vessels of the Early Roman Period from Jerusalem and Palestine: A Reassessment,” in G.C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, and L.D. Chrupcala, eds., One Land—Many Cultures: Archaeological Studies in Honour of Stanislao Loffreda OFM (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 2003), pp. 287–308, esp. 302–304.

5.
Miller, At the Intersection, pp. 153–183.

6.
Seth Schwartz, “Was There a ‘Common Judaism’ After the Destruction?” in Ra‘anan Boustan et al., ed., Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), pp. 3–21, esp. 5–6; The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), p. 84.