Watertight and Rock Solid: Stepped Pools and Chalk Vessels as Expressions of Jewish Ritual Purity
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It’s always a good thing to question established theories, as it allows ideas to be tested anew. A consensus cannot mean that the theory is correct but only that most of us have stopped thinking about the matter critically.
In the past 30 years, a rather broad scholarly consensus has formed around the idea that two particular archaeological phenomena, stepped pools and chalk vessels, are best interpreted as reflections of Jewish concerns over the Pentateuchal ritual purity laws. But this notion has been challenged—most recently by Cecilia Wassén on the pages of this very magazine.a
I believe that there are good reasons to retain the consensual view about stepped pools and chalk vessels as reflections of ritual purity observance, without having to cite later rabbinic legal notions. The case to be made, rather, has everything to do with the geographic distribution patterns of the two phenomena, which manifest boldly along ethnic lines. Jewish adherence to the Pentateuchal ritual purity laws provides a robust explanation for these distinct distribution patterns, while recent alternative interpretations create more problems than they solve.
The stepped pool is an extremely common type of installation found at archaeological sites throughout the southern Levant, with approximately a thousand examples known to date. These pools are almost invariably coated with hydraulic plaster and fitted with a flight of steps leading from the rim of the pool to its floor. The earliest pools of this type date to around 100 B.C.E., and they proliferate from the beginning of the Roman period (around 63 B.C.E.) until the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–135 C.E.). After this, new stepped pools appear in smaller numbers than previously.
When Yigael Yadin uncovered two adjacent pools of this type during his excavations at Masada, in the 1960s, he imagined that they looked very similar to a modern-day Jewish ritual bath—plumbing and all—and identified the set of pools as an ancient example of just such a ritual bath. He adopted the rabbinic term for pooled water deemed valid for ritual immersion—mikveh (plural: mikva’ot).
More stepped pools were then uncovered at a number of other sites, including Jerusalem, where Ronny Reich identified many as mikva’ot, along with hundreds more throughout the country. In a short note published almost 30 years ago, Reich formulated the following cogent argument for why these pools should be identified as mikva’ot: “If these installations are not the mikva’ot mentioned so frequently in the rabbinic literature, what are they? And if these water installations are not the mikva’ot described in this literature, then where are those mikva’ot?”b
Reich’s argument gained broad acceptance. Benjamin Wright was one of the first to challenge Reich’s theory by noting that it hinges inordinately on the writings of the later rabbis (after 70 C.E.).1 “In some quarters,” he lamented, “these rabbinic rules seem to be given a sort of interpretive hegemony over the physical remains.” Accepting that some of these pools may have served as ritual baths, Wright remained unsettled with the methodological question of how to determine whether all pools had a ritual aspect.
Hanan Eshel then argued that Reich did not adhere strictly enough to rabbinic regulations in his identification of certain stepped pools as Jewish ritual baths.c Reich subsequently returned to BAR to pen a defense of the rabbinic basis of his argument.d What both scholars held in common was a dedication to interpreting the Late Second Temple period archaeological remains in lockstep with rabbinic legal thinking from the late antique, medieval, and even modern periods.
Stuart Miller has brought nuance to the debate by arguing against the “either-or” approach.2 He thinks that it is unlikely that the ancients would have shared our modern 046distinction between “everyday” and “sacred” practices. To the contrary, it is likely that ancient Jews would have made use of stepped pools for all kinds of profane activities (such as bathing to cool off, rinsing soiled dishes, and laundering clothing), as well as for ritual purification. Miller argues against viewing ancient stepped pools as ritual baths in any formal, institutional sense, as in his mind there is little reason to think that purificatory immersion was necessarily their original or primary purpose.
Cecilia Wassén’s recent article argues against the notion that the spread of stepped pools in the first century B.C.E. demonstrates a heightened concern for purity. Wassén instead contends that these pools appeared as the result of Jewish assimilation into the general bathing culture of the Greco-Roman world. Stepped pools, she claims, were used for profane bodily washing, and their presence does not indicate a concern about purity.
I am in full agreement with both Wright and Wassén that when we approach the interpretation of first-century B.C.E. and first-century C.E. archaeological remains, we are best served by putting aside any rabbinic legal notions, which came to be compiled into the rabbinic literary corpus only at a much later date. Even if it could be shown, somehow, that these rabbinic ideas held sway among significant numbers of Jews living contemporaneously with the later rabbis (a questionable proposition itself), we certainly should not assume that anyone would have ever even entertained any of these notions before these rabbis came onto the stage.
Putting aside later rabbinic legal thought, then, I intend to demonstrate that stepped pools should be identified as Jewish immersion pools on purely archaeological grounds. Furthermore, based on purely contemporaneous textual grounds, I will contend that the type of immersions in water that evidently took place in these pools was being practiced for the purpose of ritual purification. I present this line of argument entirely without appeal to anachronisms (rabbinic or otherwise), showing incrementally that these installations are pools, that they are immersion pools, that they are Jewish immersion pools, and finally that they are Jewish ritual immersion pools.
Pools
Almost all the installations under consideration here are lined with one or more layers of hydraulic plaster, which is also used to line water cisterns. There can be no doubt that these installations were designed to hold liquid. That this liquid was water becomes clear in the instances where feeding channels have survived that channel rainwater into the installation from adjacent rainwater catchment areas. Oftentimes these installations are located adjacent to water cisterns, and the two plastered installations share the same rainwater catchment system. The only installations lacking any plaster are those at Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. These, however, were constructed below the local groundwater table and as such were apparently left without plaster to allow water to seep into them, which still occurs today.e
Immersion Pools
Without exception, all these pools have a flight of steps descending to the floor of the pool to allow access into water. In English, we refer to this type of descent into water as “immersion.” Because there is little space between the bottom step and the far wall 047of the pool, no significant activities could take place in the pool aside from the simple motion of descending into the water, turning around, ascending, and exiting. Such pools, therefore, were primarily immersion pools—a conclusion based on functional reasoning that an archaeologist working anywhere in the world would almost certainly reach.
Jewish Immersion Pools
These pools are found almost exclusively at Jewish settlements. The boundaries of Jewish settlement in the southern Levant during the first century B.C.E. and C.E. are well known from both textual sources (especially Flavius Josephus) and archaeological finds (Hebrew inscriptions and coins). There is only a small number of sites—mostly located close to these boundaries—about which questions remain as to whether they were settled by Jews. And several sites were settled by a mixed population of Jews and non-Jews. But this hardly distracts from the larger picture: Sites with stepped pools are almost exclusively located within the known Jewish areas of settlement.
Conversely, these pools are conspicuously absent from sites known to have been settled predominantly by non-Jews—such as the cities of the Decapolis, all of Western Galilee, all sites south of Beersheba, and the Greek cities along the Mediterranean coastal plain. When an archaeologist encounters a similarly unambiguous distribution pattern along cultural lines—no matter the geographical location or the kind of archaeological phenomenon—he or she must conclude that the phenomenon is culturally determined.
These installations are undeniably Jewish immersion pools.
Jewish Ritual Immersion Pools
Fortunately, we do not need to go to any great lengths to speculate as to why Jews, and only Jews, went to such trouble to construct so many immersion pools everywhere they lived. Several disparate written sources (e.g., Sirach 34:25; 048Judith 12:7; 4QToharot A [4Q274] 2i 4–6; Josephus, Antiquities 3.263; Mark 7:3-4; Luke 11:38)—all contemporary with the archaeological phenomenon at hand—tell of a current Jewish practice of immersion in water for the purpose of ritual purification. These unrelated sources—apocryphal writings, a manuscript from Qumran, a historical record from Josephus, and Gospel accounts—provide independent witnesses to a practice that appears to have been universal among Jews.
By the first century, the Pentateuch had become broadly accepted as the foundational text for an authoritative system of law known in Hebrew as Torah. Time and again, the Pentateuch calls for “bathing” in water (using the Hebrew verb r-ḥ-s) as the manner whereby various sorts of ritual impurity are to be removed. By the first century B.C.E., it seems, this Pentateuchal “bathing” came to be understood to mean full-body immersion in water.
It makes sense that the Jewish immersion pools were being built and used precisely to accommodate this practice of Jewish ritual immersion.
Although it remains possible that these pools were secondarily used for profane purposes, such as profane bodily washing, rinsing of dishes, or laundering, they certainly do not appear to have been primarily designed for any such purposes. None of these installations is fitted with an outlet drain, and many are quite large in capacity—often holding the volume equivalent to a small swimming pool. If these stepped pools were used for laundering, rinsing, or bodily washing, they would need to be drained and refilled regularly.
Still, is it possible that these are just extremely poorly designed bathtubs or laundering vats, which for some unknown reason became wildly popular only among Jews? This seems highly unlikely. Such a scenario would also leave us wondering where exactly Jews practiced the ritual immersions that we read about in contemporary texts.
Chalk Vessels
The second phenomenon usually associated with purity practices is the widespread use of chalk vessels. Sometime around the second half of the first century B.C.E., a unique family of tableware and storage vessels made of soft chalk began to appear at Jewish sites throughout the southern Levant. Vessel forms include hand-carved mugs, pitchers and bowls, various types of lathe-turned bowls and trays, and very large jars. These vessels seem to disappear around the middle of the second century C.E.
Yitzhak Magen, who assisted Benjamin Mazar in his excavations near the Temple Mount, dedicated himself to the investigation of chalkstone vessel typology and manufacturing methods, and he published the most important primary studies to date on the topic.f Magen argued—on the 049basis of rabbinic legal sources—that stone was regarded as impervious to ritual impurity. As he thought that the Pharisees were the spiritual progenitors of the rabbis, he claimed that the initial development of the chalk vessel industry was tied to the Pharisees.3 Magen’s interpretation has found several challengers.
Shimon Gibson argued that these vessels had a general, utilitarian function not associated with any religious beliefs, and that their spread was due only to this reason.4
Stuart Miller questioned why, if indeed chalk vessels came into vogue because of their insusceptibility to ritual impurity, do they begin to disappear after 135 C.E., when the rabbis were only just beginning to elaborate on the purity laws.5 Instead, Miller suggested that the genesis of the stone vessel industry was connected with the beginning of the stone building industry, introduced in Herodian Jerusalem. The stone vessels’ popularity, he added, would have been enhanced by their insusceptibility to impurity, but this would have only been a secondary benefit.
For Miller, the history of the Herodian stone carving industry explains why the phenomenon drops off dramatically after the Bar Kokhba revolt. The chalk used in vessel production, however, has nothing in common with the hard limestone used in masonry construction—neither their qualities, nor availability, nor skills needed for working them or marketing them. It also remains unexplained why the contemporary construction projects in non-Jewish cities did not lead to the parallel development of a similar vessel industry among non-Jews.
Finally, Seth Schwartz has argued that Jews used stone vessels simply because “worked limestone had become cheap.”6 He suggested that chalk vessels appeared in the late first century B.C.E. as a result of dwindling supplies of firewood needed to stoke pottery kilns, which raised the cost of pottery and made chalk a viable and cheaper substitute raw material. The thesis of firewood shortage, however, seems baseless. It is furthermore unclear under what economic model Schwartz imagined such a shortage to have affected the price of pottery for the Jews only.
Most recently, Wassén in her BAR article follows Gibson in suggesting that chalk vessels “may have been popular for utilitarian reasons, 050as well as for fashion,” and she follows Miller in proffering that “the popularity of stone vessels may be due to the flourishing stone industry during and after the reign of Herod the Great.” Wassén, however, appears to go one step further in questioning whether Late Second Temple period Jews ever entertained the notion that stone vessels might be insusceptible to ritual impurity.
As with stepped pools, I believe that a robust case can be made for the chalk vessel phenomenon as directly related to Jewish ritual purity concerns—and this without turning to the rabbinic literary corpus for support.
Significantly, chalk was never used in the southern Levant as a raw material for the large-scale production of tableware or storage vessels to be used with food—except during the brief historical period under discussion. This cannot be due to a paucity of natural chalk resources or difficulty of access, as substantial chalk outcroppings are available at or very near the surface in many locations throughout the region. The soft material is quite easy to quarry and even easier to work. Why, then, was this accessible, easy-to-work natural resource never exploited?
For anyone who has ever handled the material in person, the answer is obvious: Chalk is an extremely porous, dusty, and highly impractical raw material for vessels meant to be used with food!
An array of materials, including pottery, metals, glass, and wood, were used to produce tableware in the early Roman period. Storage containers were made from pottery or skins while chalk remained a material completely passed over by all local artisans—except for the Jewish ones. Chalk vessels are almost without exception found only at sites known to have been settled by Jews, and production sites were found only in Jewish regions. Chalk vessels have been unearthed at hundreds of Jewish sites in Judaea, Galilee, Golan, and Peraea, while they are almost completely absent from the non-Jewish coastal cities, Western Galilee, Samaria, the cities of the Decapolis, and all sites south of Beersheba. As with stepped pools, a map of archaeological sites with chalk vessels reveals a clear distribution pattern manifesting along distinct cultural lines. Chalk vessels are a uniquely Jewish phenomenon.
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So why were Jews the first and only people in the region to take what had always been regarded as a useless material and exploit it for the large-scale production of everyday tableware and storage vessels?
No contemporary written source provides an unambiguous answer to this question, but the Jewish Torah draws a clear distinction between vessels made of different kinds of raw materials vis-à-vis the laws of ritual impurity. Pottery vessels that had come into contact with impurities were to be broken, while vessels made of other materials—wood, cloth, skin, or sackcloth—were to be purified with water (Leviticus 11:32-33; Leviticus 15:12; Numbers 31:19-20). Metal vessels were to be purified with fire or water (Numbers 31:21-23). Nothing is written about vessels made of stone, such as millstones and mortars. Ancient Jews intent on adhering to these laws had to be asking themselves how the Torah regards such vessels, and they likely reasoned that since stone is not listed among the materials that can become impure, it does not become impure!
In the ancient world, pottery was by far the most common material used for producing tableware and storage vessels. But Pentateuchal law dictated that pottery that became impure was to be broken. Observance of this regulation would doubtless have been experienced as both irksome and costly. By the middle of the first century B.C.E., when the purity laws had come to be widely observed among rank-and-file Judeans, such difficulty would have likely become increasingly felt. The solution was to produce a line of tableware and storage vessels that, like mortars and millstones, were made of a material that could not become impure. The local stones used for grinding and crushing implements (mostly basalt) were too heavy, bulky, and difficult to work. And although chalk is porous and dusty, it was easily quarried and shaped into forms identical to the finest pottery wares. Importantly, it provided an adequate solution to the ritual problem posed by Pentateuchal law.
Although the precise contours of the legal argument for the use of stone vessels on religious grounds do not appear in contemporary texts, a passage in the Gospel of John provides an allusion to the idea that Jews were using storage jars made of stone specifically to comply with the Jewish purity laws: “Now there were standing there six water jars of stone, in accordance with [or: for the purpose of] the purification [laws] of the Jews, each with a capacity of two or three measures” (John 2:6). Considering that both the purpose and material of the jars is stated, the passage might well allude to the idea that Jews regarded stone to be outside the purview of Pentateuchal impurities affecting vessels.
My hypothesis does not need validation from the rabbinic legal corpus. Rather than interpreting the early archaeological finds through the lens of later rabbinic legal notions, I would suggest that we infer from earlier practices reflected in the archaeological record how the later rabbis may have come to the ideas that they did. The rabbis clearly assumed that stone vessels, along with vessels made of unfired clay and dung, were unsusceptible to ritual impurity. I posit that the archaeological record suggests that this idea was not one invented by the rabbis, but that the rabbis inherited it from exegetical interpretations of the Pentateuch widely shared by Jews in previous generations.
Closing Thoughts
The case for associating stepped pools and chalk vessels with Jewish ritual purity practices is an extraordinarily solid one. Both stepped pools and chalk vessels are without any doubt Jewish phenomena, most likely linked to ritual purity observance. None of the other posited interpretations explains satisfactorily why Jews—and only Jews—constructed stepped pools and produced chalk vessels, and none of them considers the manner in which the distribution pattern of these phenomena is laid out starkly along ethnic lines. The case for associating stepped pools and chalk vessels with Jewish purity concerns couldn’t be more watertight and rock solid!
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.
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.