Zev Radovan

Made to order. This mikveh in Jericho clearly meets the Mishnaic requirements for a ritual bath, with its deep immersion tub (left), an adjacent otzer for ritually pure water and a plugged pipe between them. Author Eshel stresses that many of the baths in Sepphoris may not be mikva’ot, even though they are deep enough, because they do not have a sufficient source of ritually pure water: They do not have otzers, and they are built too high on the city hill to obtain water from Sepphoris’s aqueduct system.