Getting Down and Dirty with Impurity

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Among the Hebrew Bible’s most obscure, perhaps even alien concepts is the notion of impurity. Modern readers may wonder what is to be gained from the detailed instructions pertaining to the pollution (ṭum’ah) caused by genital emissions, disease, corpses, and creepy-crawly creatures (Leviticus 11–15; Numbers 19). Why are we so reluctant to think about—let alone discuss—these aspects of our embodied experience? And why does the Bible cast a spotlight on these topics that are so often conveniently hidden from public view? The British anthropologist Mary Douglas took an important step in confronting biblical purity laws in her classic treatise Purity […]

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Endnotes

1. For further discussion, see Walther Farber, “How to Marry a Disease: Epidemics, Contagion, and a Magic Ritual against the ‘Hand of a Ghost,’” in H.F.J. Horstmanshoff and M. Stol, eds., Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 117–132, esp. 119–122; and Yitzhaq Feder, Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022), pp. ix, 67–68.