Death, disease and discharge of bodily fluids. What do these have in common? Not only can they be described as “gross” or “creepy,” they can render a person ritually impure according to Biblical law. They are also the subject of a paper by Yitzhaq Feder of Haifa University that won the 2012 David Noel Freedman Award for Excellence and Creativity in Hebrew Bible Scholarship. Feder’s paper, “Between Contagion and Cognition: Bodily Experience and the Conceptualization of Pollution in the Hebrew Bible,” examines the psychological and historical foundations of conceptions of impurity in ancient Israel and its relation to ancient […]
