Complex Common Judaism

Journal for
the Study of
Judaism
Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243
brill.nl/jsj
Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and other

Identity Markers of Complex Common Judaism*
Stuart S. Miller
Department of Modern and Classical Languages,
University of Connecticut, 337 Manseld Road, Unit 1057, Storrs, CT 06269, USA
stuart.miller@uconn.edu
Abstract
The interpretation of archaeological nds in light of Talmudic evidence has often
resulted in simplistic, one-to-one correlations that distort our understanding of
Judaism in Graeco-Roman Palestine. This is especially true of stepped pools
and stone vessels which, when seen as markers of Jewish ethnicity, need to be
understood with the biblical tradition in mind. Biblical notions of purity and
holiness further enable us to appreciate the persistence of ritual purity practices
after 70 C.E. The subsequent eorts of the rabbis to regulate such practices, especially those pertaining to sexuality and the household, reect the tenacity of biblical perceptions of purity and holiness especially among commoners, who had
their own understanding of their signicance. Once it is realized that the boundaries between Jews were not strictly drawn, material nds can be better assessed,
and rabbinic Judaism can be properly understood as having evolved out of a biblically derived, complex common Judaism.
Keywords
Jewish identity, ethnic markers, ritual purity, holiness, households, complex common Judaism, rabbinic self-denition, stone vessels, ritual baths
In his book, Creating Judaism, Michael Satlow asserts that the diversity of
Judaism is easier to describe than its unity. He chooses to chart Judaism
*) This article is based on my presentation at a conference devoted to A Century after
Samuel Krauss Talmudische Archologie: Rabbinic Literature and the Material Culture of
Roman Palestine held at Princeton University in November, 2008. I am grateful to many
of the participants for their feedback.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010
DOI: 10.1163/004722110X12580045809821
S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243
215
as a polythetic construct on three maps representing Israel, textual tradition, and religious practices. By avoiding the creation of a fourth map
corresponding to the beliefs of Judaism, Satlow sidesteps the issue of
assigning specic meanings to identiable practices. Satlow admits that
Jewish communities might share basic beliefs pertaining to God, Torah,
and Israel, but he concludes, the move from the conceptual categories to
more specic beliefs is by no means uniform, linear, or predictable.1
This challenge in dening and describing Judaism is readily apparent
when we turn to the situation in Late Antique Erez Israel. Talmudic
sources often assign structure and meaning to pre-existing practices. Nevertheless, as material nds and critical examination of the rabbinic corpus
indicate, many popular observances were not in sync with the approaches
of the rabbis, who often sought to regulate, ritualize, and dene them.2
Individual Jewish commoners and the communities to which they
belonged may have been selective in their approach to the views of the
rabbis or even ignorant of them, which explains the evident diversity in
practice, and the discrepancy as to which rituals, or aspects of a ritual, were
emphasized in real life.3
In short, rituals have a life of their own. As Ithamar Gruenwald has
pointed out, already within the Tanakh, rituals are sometimes prescribed
in an inconsistent fashion.4 This, of course, led to variations in practice in
1)
Michael Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006), 9. Satlow borrows from Jonathan Smith in mapping Judaism
and seeing it in polythetic terms. See Jonathan Smith, Fences and Neighbors: Some
Contours of Early Judaism, in Approaches to Ancient Judaism: Vol. 2 (ed. J. Neusner;
Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1980), 1-25. Cf. Michael Satlow, Beyond Inuence: Toward
a New Historiographic Paradigm, in Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intercontext (ed. A. Norich and Y. Z. Eliav; BJS 349; Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 2008),
37-53, esp. 51.
2)
Here and below I expand upon and further adapt what Satlow says to the specic
period under discussion.
3)
Cf. Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice, 13, 289, who builds on Haym
Soloveitchiks insistence that rituals can have an existence independent of texts. Satlow
notes with regard to Judaism throughout the ages that canonical texts represented but one
manifestation of tradition. A set of practices that may not be fully or accurately
reected in these texts or are even unknown to them constitute yet another tradition. Such
traditions belonged to real historical communities. Cf. Haym Soloveitchik, Rupture
and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy, Tradition 28:4
(1994): 64-130.
4)
See Ithamar Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2003),
173 n. 60, where he provides as an example the description of the Festival of Booths.
216
the Second Temple period, some of which later found echoes in the deliberations of the rabbis, who added new layers to the biblical tradition,
which need to be peeled away if we are to appreciate the complexity of
Jewish society during their day.5 As I have shown in my Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Erez Israel, minhag avot (the custom of the ancestors) played a pivotal role in halakic deliberations, much as mos maiorum
did for jurists in the Empire.6 The point is that the sages of Erez Israel, were
acutely aware of and acknowledged popular customs and rituals. This is not
only evident when the rabbis critique the practices of commoners, but
also on those occasions when they have diculty arriving at a halakah.
Remarkably, on some of these occasions, the sages order their disciples to
go and see what the community is doing, and do accordingly
expressly deferring their decision making until local
practice is ascertained.7 At other times, an individual sage may invoke the
practice of his own or of some other household, thereby granting those
who belonged to the domus an important role in the halakic process.8
We need to pay attention to these variations in ritual expression when
we assess the relationship between the texts and material nds that are
5)
Again, see Gruenwald, who speaks of layers of stratication. For a recent attempt to
isolate early Second Temple Period halakah, see Lawrence H. Schiman, Pre-Maccabean Halakhah in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Tradition, DSD 13 (2006):
348-61.
6)
See Stuart S. Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Erez Israel: A Philological
Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006),
374-87. On mos maiorum, see esp. Cicero, Part. Orat. 37, which is discussed by Boaz
Cohen, Jewish and Roman Law: A Comparative Study (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1966), 386. Cf. Miller, 382-83, and see Andrew Borkowski and Paul du Plessis,
Textbook on Roman Law (3d ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27-28.
7)
Interestingly, the two instances in the Yerushalmi have R. Joshua ben Levi turn to the
sibbur (community) with questions pertaining to the taking of tithes and dues. See y.
Peah 7, 20c (=y. Maa. . 5, 56b), where the community says it is not its practice to give
tithe from neta revai (fourth year fruits, Lev 19:23-25) and y. Yebam. 7, 8a, where the
community does not allow the widow of a priest to feed her slaves from priestly dues. Cf.
Miller, Sages and Commoners, 380.
8)
Regional dierences in popular practice were also routinely considered. See, for example, Miller, Sages and Commoners, 31-42 and 50-54. It should be kept in mind that the
rabbinic household incorporated others aside from family members and in many ways
functioned like a Roman domus. See Miller, 368-74. For a recent discussion of how the
terms domus and familia were used in Late Antiquity, see Kate Cooper, Approaching the
Holy Household, JECS 15 (2007): 131-42. For more on rabbinic households, see the discussion below.
217
regarded as Jewish identity markers. In her book, The Archaeology of

Ethnicity, Sin Jones critiques the earlier writing of culture-history, in
which archaeological cultures are reconstructed by correlating nds with
known ethnic groups.9 Jones draws on Pierre Bourdieus theory of habitus,
according to which ones background and experiences, that is, their disposition, interact with the situation in which one nds oneself, which
then prompts some form of adaptation.10 An understanding of the social
context of groups is, therefore, essential for appreciating whether or not
there was a need for them to express their identity, and, if so, what form
that expression would take. For Jones, ethnic identication is highly
variable and frequently results in overlapping ethnic boundaries.11
Jones, therefore, emphasizes the challenges that archaeologists face in
attempting to recover the ideas and motivations represented by their nds.12
Fortunately, Jones moves beyond her theoretical discussion in an article
devoted to an Archaeological Perspective on Jewish Identity in Antiquity.13
9)
See, Sin Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, Constructing Identities in the Past and the
Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 15-29. Jones, 5-6, 106-10, considers at length the
New Archaeology, now known as processual archaeology, which rejects this monolithic
perspective but results in rather vague or crude groupings and classications. Jones also
points out, 10-11, the problems with the most recent, post-processual reaction to culture-history, which has led to the questioning of the existence of bounded, monolithic
ethnic groups altogether. On processual and post-processual archaeology, see B. G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (2d ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 386-483.
10)
Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, 88-90.
11)
Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, 128-29, further explains that these boundaries are
at once transient, but also subject to reproduction and transformation in the ongoing processes of social life.
12)
See, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, 124, where Jones notes, archaeologists do not have
direct access to peoples ideas and perceptions. She cites Bruce G. Trigger, Comments on
Archaeological Classication and Ethnic Groups, Norwegian Archaeological Review 10
(1977): 20-23, who discusses the challenges archaeologists face in extracting ideas, as
opposed to behavioral patterns, from their nds. See, more recently, Trigger, A History of
Archaeological Thought, 507-8. Cf. Andrea Berlin, Jewish Life before the Revolt: The
Archaeological Evidence, JSJ 36 (2005): 417-70, esp. 418.
13)
The full title is Identities in Practice, Towards an Archaeological Perspective on Jewish
Identity in Antiquity which appeared in Jewish Local Patriotism and Self-identication in
the Graeco-Roman Period (ed. S. Jones and S. Pearce; Sheeld: Sheeld Academic Press,
1998), 29-49. In her book, Jones periodically considers the Romanization of Britain and
warns against simplistic categorizations such as Roman vs. native, but she is largely occupied with theory. See Alexander Joes review of The Archaeology of Ethnicity in JNES 60
(2001): 211-14, where he suggests that Jones would have found the ancient Near East a
218
All too often, she insists, various ethnic markers are identied, leading to
the assigning of xed, one-to-one correlations between specic groups
known from literary sources and various material styles.14 Finds are then
typed into neat categories, for example, as Hellenistic or Roman,
Jewish, or Hellenized/Romanized Jewish. It is unlikely, however, that
material indicators of acculturation represent a straightforward change
in, or loss of, identity.15 Rather, Jewish identity was in a constant state of
denition.16
This is precisely the reason that a few decades ago scholars had diculty characterizing Second Temple Period Judaism, with some siding
with Jacob Neusner that there were many, discrete Judaisms and others
preferring Ed Sanders notion of a common Judaism.17 It is also why I
more fruitful area for examination, since the extremely varied archaeological remains leave
the impression that local patterns of habitus . . . changed over time. As we shall presently
see, in the article under discussion, Jones turns her attention to Jewish identity in the
Diaspora and in Palestine, which proved to be an equally splendid example of the challenges in studying ethnicities.
14)
Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity, 134, 139-40. Cf. Martin Pitts, The Emperors New
Clothes? The Utility of Identity in Roman Archaeology, AJA 111 (2007): 693-713. See,
too, the interesting methodology adopted by Karen B. Stern, Inscribing Devotion and
Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
2008), especially her discussion, 37-40, of monodirectional understandings of inuence and assimilation. Stern prefers the use of culture with its vague, expansive and
inclusive properties and follows Peter van Dommelen in using cultural identity for
honing in on the experiences of individuals within a larger cultural milieu. Cf. Peter van
Dommelen, Punic Persistence, Colonialism and Cultural Identities in Roman Sardinia,
in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire (ed. R. Laurence and J. Berry; London: Routledge, 2001), 25-48, esp. 26. With regard to North Africa, Stern cautiously notes that we
cannot always take for granted that a one-to-one relationship between complex artifacts
and complex humans existed, but often there is a correlation. See her Limitations of
Jewish as a Label in Roman North Africa, JSJ 39 (2008): 307-36.
15)
Jones, Identities in Practice, 34, argues that a specic groups identity is unlikely to be
monolithic or homogeneous. She further asserts, archaeological material is still attributed
a particular identity in a monolithic and xed fashion (37) and maintains that it is doubtful that we will nd a particular ethnic or religious group represented by a discrete, uniform pattern of particular types of material culture in the archaeological record (39).
16)
Jones is true to her earlier theoretical statement in which she draws upon the processual and post-processual schools critiques of archaeological cultures (cf. above n. 9), as
monothetic, easily dened, xed, and bounded ethnic groupings. See especially, The
Archaeology of Ethnicity, 106-10.
17)
Common Judaism is described in E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63
B.C.E.66 C.E. (2d ed.; London: SCM, 1994), 45-57. Neusners responses to Sanders are
219
have put forth the notion of a complex common Judaism, particularly

with reference to post-70 C.E. Where Neusner sees diversity and Sanders
wishes to discern a common denominator, I wish to draw attention to
both and, simultaneously, to emphasize that when we overly-focus on distinct sects and groups, we overlook components and inter-relationships
that cannot be categorized. While we may speak of a biblically negotiated
koin whose elements were variously adhered to by dierent groups of
Jews, the tendency has been to emphasize these groups distinctiveness
rather than their intersecting interests, and to lose sight altogether of the
vast majority of Jews who probably did not identify with any of them.18
Drawing on complexity theory, which has been in vogue in mathematics and the sciences since the 1990s, I am arguing that while there were
many biblically derived ideas and practices that nurtured (and in turn
were nurtured by) the habitus of the Jews in Graeco-Roman Palestine, the
result was, as articulated in Sages and Commoners, a type of complex
adaptive system that maintained enough order or structure to amount to
common Judaism, but which was suciently chaotic to allow for innovation and individuality, in short, for the complexity that often resists
compartmentalization or easy characterization.19
brought together in his Judaic Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: A Systematic Reply to Professor
E. P. Sanders (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993). For other discussions of the issue, see the
notes to Miller, Sages and Commoners, 21-23.
18)
Cf. the observation of Jrgen Zangenberg concerning Second Temple period sectarianism: sects are hardly visible in the material culture and seem to be much more a part of
the literary world of ancient (and perhaps modern) authors and their interests. See Jrgen
Zangenberg, Sanderss Common Judaism and the Common Judaism of Material Culture, in Redening First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (ed. F. E. Udoh, S. Heschel, M. Chancey, and B. Tatum; Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame, 2008), 179-82. I am grateful to Jrgen for our many discussions of the issues surrounding the interpretation of material nds during our seasons
together at Sepphoris. For the use of koin with reference to Judaism, see Steven Fine, Art
and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5,
where Fine calls attention to the use of the term by Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in
Late Antiquity (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 173-93, who refers to a Mediterranean
koin and a Christian koin in Late Antiquity.
19)
Miller, Sages and Commoners, 25-26. When I wrote this book, I was unaware of the
interesting attempt of Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, A Synthesis of Parallactic
Approaches (London: Continuum, 2001), 646-48 to apply complexity theory to Israelite
religion. See too, his False Dichotomies in Descriptions of Israelite Religion: A Problem,
Its Origin, and a Proposed Solution, in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past,
(ed. W. G. Dever; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 223-35, where he briey takes
220
This complex Jewish society had room for zodiacs and depictions of
Helios in synagogue mosaics, invocations of Helios such as that found in
Sefer ha-Razim, and magical amulets.20 In my Epigraphical Rabbis,
Helios, and Psalm 19: Were the Synagogues of Archaeology and the Synagogues of the Sages One and the Same?21 and elsewhere I have attempted
to move beyond questions as to who controlled the excavated, monumental synagogues, and whose Judaism was reected in their architecture
and artwork. It was precisely because the question of the rabbis possible
inuence or lack of inuence on these synagogues seemed of little heuristic value for the study of Judaism in Late Antiquity, that I attempted to
demonstrate where rabbinic tradition and some of the themes of the
mosaic oors overlap.22 The world of the monumental synagogue and that
of the rabbis were not mutually exclusive and certainly not in constant,
palpable tension. Their intersection speaks volumes about Jewish society
at the timenot because it allows us to isolate and identify a coherent,
unied community and the rabbis role thereinbut rather, as Hayim
Lapin has pointed out, because it raises questions about how we should
characterize such a community or society.23
Lapin sees the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic art found in synagogues, invocations of Helios, and rabbinic laws that attempted to regulate such developments, as indications of boundaries that were constantly
up (229-30) Second Temple period Judaism and, in relationship to biblical religion, speaks
(232) of a minimal Israelite koin of credo and practice similar to the common Judaism
of Late Antiquity. Zevit, however, sees a dierent organization pattern underlying Israelite religion. I think there are closer anities between Israelite society and that of the
Second Temple and later period than Zevit realizes, however. I will return to the relevance
of Zevits observations below. For an attempt to arrive at some of the more uniform
aspects of the Judean habitus in the rst century, see Markus Cromhout and Andries van
Aarde, A Socio-Cultural Model of Judean Ethnicity: A Proposal, HTS 62 (2006):
69-101. See too, Markus Cromhout, Jesus and Identity, Reconstructing Judean Ethnicity in
Q (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade, 2007), 100-105.
20)
Cf. Hayim Lapin, Locating Ethnicity and Religious Community in Later Roman Palestine, in Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine (ed. H. Lapin;
Bethesda, Md.: University Press of Maryland, 1998). 9-17.
21)
JQR 94 (2004): 27-76.
22)
For more on the issue of rabbinic inuence, cf. Miller, Sages and Commoners, 14-20,
339-466, and passim. Similar concerns (and many others) regarding the usefulness of
inuence for understanding ancient Judaism have been raised by Satlow, Beyond Inuence: Toward a New Historiographic Paradigm.
23)
Lapin, Locating Ethnicity and Religious Community in Later Roman Palestine,
17-23.
221
being drawn and redrawn.24 The problem, however, is that material

nds, considerably more so than textual sources, seldom allow for the facile detection of rigid boundaries. Sure, the synagogue mosaic at Sepphoris,
with its nongurative allusion to Helios, is distinct from the mosaics
belonging to the synagogues at H ammat Tiberias and Bet Alfa, which
clearly depict the sun god on his chariot. But were the communities that
commissioned these mosaics really so dierent, so much so that we can
speak of well-drawn or redrawn boundaries between them? Was there a
resistance in fth-century Sepphoris to the gurative representation of a
pagan deity that did not exist elsewhere in the Galilee, either earlier in
fourth-century H ammat Tiberias or in sixth-century Bet Alfa?
Perhaps, but the material nds more usually do not speak so eloquently
in favor of such nuanced understandings.25 What we are left with is a
mesh of artistic and spiritual expression that undoubtedly characterized
much of Jewish society. Whereas extant texts allow us to identify groups
such as the various haireseis (sects) of the Second Temple period and
later the rabbis, archaeological nds seldom allow for this kind of precision and instead leave us with a sense that Jewish society in Late Antiquity more usually deed strict boundary-making, beyond more general
typing as Jews, Samaritans, Christians, pagans, etc., each of which
require quotes to signify their uidity in meaning.26
24)
Ibid., 18.
Cf. Zeev Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an Ancient Message through Its
Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts ( Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2005),
235, who insists that the more restrained depiction in the Sepphoris mosaic should not be
regarded as a result of the local inhabitants religious, anti-pagan extremism. Weiss
argues that the other mythological themes of the mosaic, including the zodiac, argue
against this. What is noteworthy and telling, however, is not only the persistent, pagan
themes in the mosaics at Sepphoris, H ammat Tiberias, and Bet Alfa, but also the common
architectural conguration of the three synagogues, which drew attention to the ark of the
Torah that dominated and towered above the oor. The themes of the oors point to the
likelihood that the worshippers in these three synagogues had more, rather than less, in
common theologically, which would include notions of the role God and the sun/Helios
played respectively in the cosmos. See my discussion in Epigraphical Rabbis, Helios,
and Psalm 19, 58, 71, and, especially, 74-75.
26)
The Dead Sea Sect too would have been dicult to discuss had it not been for the texts
that the sect left behind. The material remains at the Qumran settlement would hardly
have given us the same picture of an organized, well-dened sect. See especially,
Zangenberg, Sanderss Common Judaism, 181-82.
25)
222
For their part, the rabbis were keenly aware of the complex nature of
the society in which they lived and divulge useful information about the
threats to their worldview and way of life. Some of these threats may only
have existed from their perspective, as they continuously dened themselves
over and against other Jews. In their case, at least, the drawing and
redrawing of their identity was essential for the emergence of a coherent
rabbinic movement.27 The rabbis characterization of their Jewish neighbors indicates that they were drawing boundaries, even if, or when, their
neighbors were not, at least not in response to them. And yet the rabbis
boundary-drawing itself is suciently elastic, or to borrow Lapins terms,
porous and exible,28 inasmuch as the sages were especially preoccupied with those who shared certain perspectives or practices with them.
The terms they use, not just obvious ones, such as minim and ammei
ha-ares, but also benei-29 and anshei- ha-ir, or, more specically, benei/
anshei town X, whom I have shown were distinct from the ammei
ha-ares, are rather general designations that reect an awareness of a
larger Jewish society to which the rabbis too, despite their occasional distancing, belonged.30 Their boundary-drawing was not only porous and
exible, it was also quite transparent!
Still, it is important to keep the rabbis lack of precision in referring to
other Jews in mind when we consider archaeological nds such as stepped
27)
To be sure, the larger groupings underwent dening and re-dening as Jones argues.
See above. I agree that their boundary making was in progress, but it would take time for
Christians, Samaritans, and Jews to sort it all out, much as others have argued. My major
disagreement with those who postulate a late emergence (or reemergence) of Judaism
after the christianization of the empire, is that I believe Jewish self-denition was not only
well underway earlier on, but also that it had already yielded a pretty well dened, if
numerically limited, rabbinic movement by the second c. C.E. See my, Sages and Commoners, 446-66, and, especially, Stuart S. Miller, Roman Imperialism, Jewish Self-Denition, and Rabbinic Society: Belayches Iudaea-Palaestina, Schwartzs Imperialism and Jewish
Society, and Boyarins Border Lines Reconsidered, AJSR 31 (2007): 1-34.
28)
Lapin, Locating Ethnicity and Religious Community in Later Roman Palestine, 21
and 29.
29)
And occasionally benot-, on which see below.
30)
Most of these terms are covered in my Sages and Commoners in Late Antiquity. See
especially, 163-78 and 301-38. On the minim see Stuart S. Miller, The Minim of Sepphoris Reconsidered, HTR 86 (1993): 377-402 and idem, Further Thoughts on the
Minim of Sepphoris, Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division
B, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies), 1-8. See too my Roman Imperialism, Jewish Self-Denition, and Rabbinic Society, 350, 351, and 357-59.
223
pools31 and stone vessels. Many of the pools at Sepphoris belong to

domestic settings among which were found stone vessels as well as earthenware from the known Jewish pottery center at Kefar Hananiah. These
settings are notably devoid of pig bone. This composite evidence points to
a Jewish ethnic identity.32
Fortunately, plenty more may be inferred. We may not have direct
access to the precise motivations of Jews such as those who lived in
Graeco-Roman Sepphoris, but the behaviors suggested by the nds reveal
much about their cultural mentality and disposition. Gruenwald speaks
of the transformation that rituals brought to entire communities.33 I
would like to suggest that the transformative value of rituals be broken
down further. The contexts of the material nds at Sepphoris lead us to
the building blocks of communities, to wit, to the domestic settings and
the families that once resided therein. Purity rituals performed in the
home had a direct impact on the day to day life of the family, regulating
sexuality and possibly, how, when, and what one ate. At the same time,
such rituals undoubtedly meant more to their practitioners, who most
assuredly viewed the home as the most immediate setting for, to borrow
Gruenwalds expression, the attitudinal space in which the transformation of community and cosmos began.34
Of course, we do not want to violate the concern raised earlier about
overassigning meaning to archaeological remains. Still, while it is wrong
31)
I am purposely avoiding the rabbinic term miqveh/miqvaot (ritual bath/baths) for

reasons that will become clearer below.
32)
Of late, some have preferred the term Judean, or even Israelite, as opposed to Jew
and have questioned further the use of the derivative Jewish. See, for example, Steve
Mason, Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History, JSJ 38 (2007): 457-512, and cf. John H. Elliot, Jesus the Israelite was neither a
Jew nor a Christian: On Correcting Misleading Nomenclature, Journal for the Study of
the Historical Jesus 5 (2007), 119-54. The concerns that have been raised are not germane
to the points being made here since I prefer an ambiguous understanding of Jewish
identity in antiquity which was closer to reality than an overprecise denition of the relevant Hebrew and Greek terms allows. For this perspective and a defense of the traditional
usage, see Daniel R. Schwartz, Judaean or Jew? How Should We Translate Ioudaios in
Josephus? in Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman World (ed. J. Frey, D. R. Schwartz, and S.
Gripentrog; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3-27. On the diculty in attempting to distinguish
between ethnic, political, and religious connotations of identity in antiquity, see David
Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006), 12-14.
33)
Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel, 17, 34, 55-56 and 69-70.
34)
Cf. ibid., 27-28.
224
to read the worldview and halakic perspectives of the rabbis into the nds,
we certainly stand on more secure ground when we to turn to some of the
broader ideas bequeathed by the Torah to the Jews of Graeco-Roman Palestine.35 Jonathan Klawans has demonstrated how scholars have often
missed the connection between impurity and sin implicit in the Torah.36
Klawans, however, distinguishes between ritual and moral impurities.
Others disagree with this bifurcation. Tikva Frymer-Kensky points out that
pollution, that is, the lack of purity, aects individuals, the temple,
the collectivity of Israel, and the Land of Israel. Accordingly, pollution
and purgation provided a paradigm by which Israel could understand and
35)
In what follows, I assume that the engagement within sectarian and other writings during the late Second Temple period with the contents of the Torah and with much of what
eventually became known as the Tanakh reects a pervasive knowledge of at least rudimentary biblical ideas and practices. The many rewritings of Scripture during this period
certainly take for granted an intense interest in biblical themes among literate circles. At
the same time, the existence and functioning of the temple in Jerusalem certainly was
predicated upon a general familiarity with at least basic biblical purity laws and perceptions. This familiarity need not have been dependent upon widespread literacy. Nor did it
necessarily hinge on public readings of the Torah which are thought to have led to the
emergence of the synagogue. To be sure, the oral mentality that is taken for granted in
Neh 8:4-8, where Ezra and his associates read the Torah publicly, translating it and giving
the sense so that it is understood by the people, provides some insight into the dynamic
that led to greater awareness of biblical traditions. What needs to be better understood,
however, is what Susan Niditch refers to the complex interplay between oral and literate
mentalities, which will move us away from the traditional overemphasis on literacy, with
its elitist associations, and will provide us with a better appreciation of the social context
and dynamics that were at play in the dissemination of knowledge of biblical (in the widest sense) writings. See Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite
Literature (Louisville: Westminster, 1996), 89-130.
36)
True, some New Testament scholars have overly identied impurity with sin, but in
describing ancient Judaism, the deling character of sin is still often missed. According to
Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 7, one cannot set out to discuss impurity in Ancient Judaism without coming to
terms with sin and its deling force. Although Klawans is critical of the eorts of David
Z. Homan, Adolf Bchler, Tikva Frymer-Kensky and David P. Wright, it will be benecial for our purposes to see in particular where Frymer-Kensky and Wright are coming
from and how they assess matters before returning to some of Klawans important views
(see below n. 48). Klawans does away with the oft repeated view of Gedaliah Alon that
there was a tension between the minimalists who restricted purity laws to the temple and
the priesthood and the maximalists who believed they applied to all of Israel. The minimalist position of course would be assigned to the Sadducees, and the maximalist to the
Pharisees. Bchler also tended to see a dual understanding of purity, speaking in terms of
Levitical and religious delement, much as D. Z. Homan did before him.
225
survive [emphasis mine] the destruction of the [First] Temple.37 People

who believed that these pollutions brought about catastrophic retribution, including exile and destruction, were not about to lose sight of the
oending pollutions, even once the mechanism for purgation, that is,
the temple, was lost.38
To be sure, Frymer-Kensky has in mind a delement of the land
brought about by sexual abominations, murder, and idolatry, not by the
physical impurities in Lev 11-15 and Num 19.39 But her work suggests a
close interrelationship between danger beliefs and contagious pollutions, which could eectively isolate the individual or the community
from holy things.40 Especially interesting is her observation that the exile
in 586 B.C.E. brought a new stress on individual [emphasis mine] retribution and a reversal of the national responsibility of Israel for the sins
of its members.41 It would not be surprising if the national calamity in
70 C.E. led to a similar sense of responsibility on the part of the individual for moral failings as well as to his/her increased fear of becoming ritually deled. With the further dashing of hope for the restoration of the
temple in 135 C.E., a palpable distancing both temporally and physically
from its sancta may have been compensated for by further devotion to
ritual purity practices, particularly those that pertained to individual
members of a household.42
37)
Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Pollution, Purication, and Purgation in Biblical Israel, in The

Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman in Celebration of
His Sixtieth Birthday (ed. C. L. Meyers and M. OConnor; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 399-414, at 399.
38)
Essentially, Frymer-Kensky is introducing the role of delement or pollution into the
more usual misdeed and [subsequent] judgment equation that has been used to explain
the destruction of the First Temple. In her words (ibid., 409), The idea of pollution was a
major theoretical paradigm which enabled Israel to absorb and survive [emphasis mine]
the eventual destruction of the state. Frymer-Kensky believes that destruction and resulting exile were notions that originated within a system of cosmic pollution and purgation. My argument below will be that notions of purity and impurity would persist after
the destruction of the Second Temple precisely because of the same dynamic.
39)
Ibid., 406, where Frymer-Kensky develops Jacob Milgroms miasmic understanding of
impurities.
40)
Ibid., 403.
41)
Ibid., 412, especially points to the work of Moshe Weinfeld, Jeremiah and the Spiritual Metamorphosis of Israel, ZAW 88 (1976): 17-56 in this connection.
42)
Bathing rituals for postnatal and postmenstrual women as well as for men and women
who had engaged in sexual relations or who experienced a genital discharge would be
some examples of areas of purity laws that would and did undergo further development.
226
David Wrights understanding of the spectrum of priestly impurity

moves us in this direction. Wright regards the tolerated impurities, that
is, those brought on by disease and death or by sexual discharges or
involvement in certain cultic rites, as protections against the incursion of
the more serious prohibited impurities, by which he means those that
result from the disregard of the tolerated impurities or from moral transgressions.43 Wright insists that the purities system as a whole has symbolic
These might be characterized as individual expressions of piety. See Eyal Regev, Pure Individualism: The Idea of Non-Priestly Purity in Ancient Judaism, JSJ 31 (2000): 176-202.
Cf. Jacob Licht, Megillat ha-Serakhim mi-Megillot Midbar Yehudah, Serekh ha-Yahad, Serekh ha-Edah, Serekh ha-Berakhot (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1965), 298-99, who points out that
the distinction between the rabbis approach to purities and that of the Dead Sea Sect is
that the latter was committed to communal purity practices that were part of a larger, separatist agenda. As opposed to the Yahad, the rabbis emphasized the fastidiousness of the
individual h aver within a larger, familial and societal structure to which he continued to
belong. Frymer-Kensky, Pollution, Purication, and Purgation in Biblical Israel, 409,
calls attention to the feminine perception of the land and also notes that the menstruant
(niddah), who is the ultimate deled woman, is the symbol for the destroyed nation in
Ezek 36:17 and Ezra 9:11 (and possibly Lam 1: 8). Her observation, 413 n. 9, that the
Torah does not specify xed bathing rituals for women after menstruation (or after childbirth; it is prescribed for after intercourse), and that the passing of time alone most likely
rendered both women and the feminine conceived of land pure, does not in any way
undermine my argument. Hannah K. Harrington, The Impurity Systems of Qumran and
the Rabbis: Biblical Foundations (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 123-38, argues that ablutions following menstruation can at least be inferred from the biblical text. In any event, it
is likely that ritual bathing, particularly when cultic rites of purication could no longer
be performed in the wake of a national catastrophe, would have taken on new applications
and meaning. It is important to keep in mind too that although temple and home were to
some extent distinct cultic/religious domains in antiquity, there always was, and undoubtedly continued to be even after the destruction, an interplay between practices and rites
carried out in the home/family and those (once) performed at the temple in Jerusalem.
See the recent discussion of Stanley K. Stowers, Theorizing the Religion of Ancient
Households and Families, in Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (ed. J. Bodel and
S. Olyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 5-19, esp. 12-14.
43)
The tolerated impurities are largely presented in Lev 11-15 and Num 19. See David
P. Wright, The Spectrum of Priestly Impurity, in Priesthood and Cult in Ancient Israel,
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement 125 (ed. G. A. Anderson and
S. M. Olyan; Sheeld: Sheeld Academic Press, 1991), 152-58. It is important to note
that Wrights formulation is truly a spectrum with overlapping categories. This allows
him to invoke Mary Douglas structural approach as we shall presently see. Despite the
important objections of Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, 17, to the nomenclature Wright adopts to categorize the dierent types of delement, the distinction
227
social import. The regulating of impurities that are not threatening, that
is, those that are benecial or unavoidable and are, therefore, tolerated,
contribute to the maintenance of the moral order of society. The rites
associated with these tolerated impurities have a prophylactic function,
inasmuch as they prevent the socially detrimental breach of rules that
would cause prohibited impurity.44
Wright further points out that the participation of the individual in
ritual purity rites fosters a sense of connectedness with a community.
Contracting a tolerated impurity may not be problematic, but intentionally delaying purication or in other ways violating relevant restrictions would brand one as a social rebel and traitor who has upset the
moral order.45 Wright suggests that the consequences of lesser-tolerated
ritual impurities, such as lochial and abnormal genital discharges, and
leprosy might be latent during periods of social wholeness but would
increase in signicance in periods of moral decay. He further suggests
that during such periods of dysfunction the tolerated impurities would
serve to hold the centrifugal forces in. At the same time, the emerging
stress might lead to a revision [emphasis mine] of ritual in order to keep
the moral strains in check.46 Perhaps purity practices provided (as did ritual in general) a sense of security, not just as Wright suggests, in the
period of disintegration that followed the destruction of the First Temple, but also after 70 C.E., when the holiness of Erez Israel was further
Wright makes between tolerated and prohibited forms of impurity and his emphasis
on their interrelationship remains instructive.
44)
Wright, The Spectrum of Priestly Impurity, 171-72. Some lesser-tolerated but
unavoidable impurities, such as lochial and abnormal genital discharges, and leprosy, pollute the outer altar and require a hattat sacrice, just as some inadvertent, prohibited
impurities do. However, those who intentionally incur prohibited impurities dele the
inner sanctum of the Temple, which requires the purication sacrices of Yom Kippur,
and may be subject to either divine excision (karet) or, in the case of sacrice to Molec
(Lev 20:2-5), execution. See ibid., 155-165. The tolerated impurities are, therefore, a form
of inoculation against the evils and consequences associated with the prohibited impurities. In addition to Wrights Spectrum, 175, see his The Disposal of Impurity: Elimination
Rites in the Bible and in Hittite and Mesopotamian Literature (Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1987), 163-228. Also see the following note.
45)
Simply put, lesser impurities do not exist for themselves but are associated with the
larger moral concerns of society that lie behind prohibited impurity. See Wright, The
Spectrum of Priestly Impurity, 180.
46)
Ibid., 178-80.
228
compromised by the very real presence of pagan institutions and the

ubiquitous symbols of Roman domination.47
Indeed, the missing component in appreciating the purities-sin nexus
is holiness. Martha Himmelfarb and Hannah Harrington have recently
emphasized that the Holiness Code in Lev 17-26 derives its perception
and description of grave sins from the Priestly Code.48 Harrington notes
47)
Contra Gruenwald, Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel, 121, who over-emphasizes the connection of ritual purity practices to the Temple. See Martin S. Jaee, Early
Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Jewish Millennium (2d ed.; Bethesda: University Press
of Maryland, 2006), 117, who asserts with regard to the eorts of the rabbis: Laws that
once protected the holiness and purity of the temple and its personnel were now [after
70 C.E.] applied to the territory and the people that the temple had sanctied. Cf. the
observations of Hannah K. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman
World (London: Routledge, 2001), 179.
48)
Klawans, 36-38, questions Wrights argument that there is an underlying moral basis
and rationale to the entire system of purities. Despite obvious overlapping terminology
used to refer to both categories of pollution (e.g., tame ), there are distinct terms such as
hanef (to be polluted) and toevah (abomination) that are only used with reference to
moral (prohibited) impurity. Certain moral sins dele the land, whereas no ritual impurities do so. As for the sanctuary/temple, here too, sin deles from a distance whereas ritual
impurities only do so through physical contact. Ablution only removes ritual impurities,
not moral ones. Finally, those who commit the latter are not restricted from the sanctuary/temple, whereas those suering ritual impurities are. Klawans argues that the Bible is
not reticent when it comes to the symbolic meaning of rituals (e.g., the Sabbath in Deut
5:14-15 and tassels in Num 15:37-41). However, with regard to ritual purity laws the connection with the deling character of sin is nowhere to be found. Thus there is no compelling evidence in the texts for two distinct but analogous conceptions of contagion.
Some of Klawans objections are reasonable, but not entirely convincing, if only because
he too rigidly distinguishes between the Priestly and Holiness Codes, which allows him to
argue that the whole biblical purities edice consists of discreet parts. Himmelfarb, in an
unpublished response to Klawans in a session devoted to Purity from the Bible to the
Mishna at the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, December, 2003
(used with Himmelfarbs permission), sees one system of laws based on an idea of ritual
impurity and another system that refers back to the rst and uses elements drawn from it
to develop laws for grave sins, of which the vast majority are linked to ritual purity [emphasis
mine]. What matters to Himmelfarb is not the Torahs use of distinct terms in its treatment of ritual and moral impurities, or more generally in the Priestly (P) and Holiness
(H) codes, but rather its common usages: Klawans separate-but-equal treatment [i.e., of
ritual and moral impurities] obscures the debt of the Holiness Codes conception of impurity to that of the priestly source: The Holiness Codes concept of impurity applies Ps
technical terminology for ritual impurity, particularly the root tm, but also the term niddah, to other areas of life. Cf. Martha Himmelfarb, A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and
Merit in Ancient Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 87-92.
229
that the commandment to be holy is most pronounced in priestly texts.

Yet, the Holiness Code itself is devoted to the benecial features of Gods
holiness, which Israel is to emulate. As Jacob Milgrom explains, It [the
Holiness Code] generates blessing and life; it is the antonym and ultimate
conqueror of impurity, the symbol of death.49 The rabbis adopted this
perception of the dynamics of holiness and impurity, which must have
been obvious to many Jews in their day, at least those with some knowledge of the biblical purity system.50
Christine Hayes captures the precise point I am making:51
Himmelfarb rightly takes Klawans to task for overly-dierentiating between the ritual
and moral impurities and for arguing that, while we see a conation of the two categories
in the writings of the Dead Sea scrolls, tannaitic literature continues what he believes to
be the biblical predilection for compartmentalizing the purity concerns of P and H. Himmelfarb instead counters that sectarian writings do not conate the two categories. Instead,
their use of Ps terminology of ritual impurity to describe moral states represents a further
development of a process that begins in the Holiness Code. Similarly, Himmelfarb points
out that the reason the deling character of sin appears in aggadah rather than in halakic
texts is because it has very few practical implications, that is, with a single exception,
there is no process of purication from this impurity, nor is there any way to prevent it
from being conveyed to the sanctuary or the land. The exception Himmelfarb points to
is the shedding of a murderers blood.
To be sure, in Klawans response to Himmelfarb (at the same meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies, cited here with Klawans permission), he concedes that the cultivation of purity is about seeking holiness, in emulation of the priesthood, but the point
he seems to miss is that holiness is also essential to understanding the relationship between
P and H, or more specically, between ritual and moral impurities. It is precisely his
admission that if there is a single system, it is Israelite religion as a whole, that brings us
almost full circle, that is, to a consideration of a more integrated and comprehensive
understanding, if not a fully articulated system.
49)
Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
(AB; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1720. Cf. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and
the Graeco-Roman World, 40. The view that holy and impure are antonyms (Cf. Milgrom, 1721 and Harrington, 39) is contested by Christine E. Hayes, Gentile Impurities
and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 226 n. 28, who instead sees the two characteristics as
inimical states. In her comments at the AJS conference (see above n. 48), she fully
acknowledges, however, the pivotal role of holiness in appreciating purity. See below.
50)
See Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman World, 40-42 and
especially the Appendix devoted to the rabbinic hierarchy of holiness, 207-8.
51)
Remarks on Hyam Maccoby, Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and its Place
in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) at the session devoted to Purity
from the Bible to the Mishna, AJS annual conference, December, 2003 (see above n. 48).
I am grateful to Christine Hayes for permitting me to reproduce this extended excerpt.
230
some Jews saw the requirements of purity as necessary only when one entered
sacred precincts . . . some may have viewed purity as necessary also when
entering sacred time (such as a festival or Sabbath day); others may have
viewed purity as necessary when engaged in various sacred activities . . . And
it seems entirely reasonable to suppose that some Jews would have understood the very holiness of the nation Israel as requiring constant vigilance
against delement and attention to purity in all areas of daily life (eating,
sexual intercourse, etc.) regardless of the existence of the Temple [emphasis
mine]. Nevertheless, even for these maximalists, purity was never an end in
itself. Purity was always observed because of its essential connection to holiness
[emphasis mine].
Of course, we must ask how much of the dynamics of ritual purity as presented in the biblical tradition informs our understanding of stepped
pools and stone vessels.52 What is certain, both from rabbinic and material sources, is that Jews continued to be preoccupied with ritual purity
long after 70 C.E.53 Shaye Cohens and Martin Goodmans assessments of
52)
As Tracy Lemos has recently pointed out, it is important to keep in mind that the
Tanakh preserves several purity systems and that rituals had shifting meanings that often
depended on locale. Moreover, there likely were other learned notions of delement that
were not neatly regulated by biblical legislation that also played a role in the disposition of
the practitioners. Lemos points especially to notions of hygiene that are cross-cultural. See
my ensuing discussion, especially of the multiple uses of stepped pools. Cf. Tracy M.
Lemos, Where There is Dirt, is There System?: Revisiting Biblical Purity Construction,
forthcoming. My thanks to Tracy Lemos for providing me with an advance copy.
53)
It must be emphasized that perceptions drawn from the uncritical use of rabbinic
sources often lead to simplistic understandings that read too much of rabbinic thinking
into such nds. Steven Fine and I have argued that the use of stone vessels is likely to have
been a spin-o from the stone industry that experienced its heyday in Herodian Jerusalem. This would explain why stone vessel use appears to fall o (but see below, n. 62, end)
after the early second century. See my, Some Observations on Stone Vessel Finds and
Ritual Purity in Light of Talmudic Sources, in Zeichen aus Text und Stein: Studien auf dem
Weg zu einer Archologie des Neuen Testaments (ed. S. Alkier and J. Zangenberg; Texte und
Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 42; Tbingen: Francke Verlag, 2003), 402-19.
Cf. Steven Fine, A Note on Ossuary Burial and the Resurrection of the Dead in First
Century Jerusalem, JJS 51 (2000): 69-76. Stepped pools, particularly of the stand-alone
variety, are likely to have been a local creation that had both ritual and profane uses, especially when they belong to domestic settings. Neither stepped pools nor stone vessels
should be considered markers signifying a Jewish presence if there is no contextual evidence to support such identication. While it is generally accepted that we can expect to
nd stepped pools and stone vessels at sites where Jews are known to have lived, e.g., Second Temple period Jerusalem and Jericho, or pre- and post-70 Sepphoris and other places
231
tannaitic case law led them to conclude that ritual purity was a primary
concern of the rabbis. Goodman notes that the tannaim were mainly concerned with corpse impurity, utensils, and especially menstrual contamination, which was the most frequent source of delement. At the same
time, both Cohen and Goodman insist that the concerns emphasized by
the tannaim were those that, in Cohens words, were practiced the least
by a substantial segment of the population.54
To be sure, Goodman emphasizes that it is the minutiae of rabbinic
purity laws that were ignored by the poor man gleaning, the olive treader,
and others. This, however, is a potentially misleading conclusion that
stems from the preoccupation at the end of the last century with the
extent of inuence of the Pharisees and the rabbi on Jewish society.
Neglect of rabbinic purity laws does not inform us about the actual extent
of ritual purity practices, or about the relative meticulousness of those
who derived their practices more directly from the biblical tradition. It
only indicates that the rabbis found local practice of their halakot to be
wanting.55 This was certainly true of the ammei ha-ares, who, nevertheless,
were not regarded by the rabbis as entirely lacking in mitzvot. More
in Galilee, this does not allow for the wholesale and uncritical referencing of rabbinic
sources to ll in the blanks for the details of their use. While it is easy to arrive at the conclusion, certainly with regard to Sepphoris, that we are dealing with Jewish identity markers, this is not necessarily the case elsewhere. A lone stepped pool at Mareshah, or Tyre, or
a single stone vessel from Dura (such as one I came across in the Yale collection several
years ago) does not necessarily testify to a Jewish presence. Conversely, the presence of
stepped pools in non-Jewish towns such as Mareshah or Tyre, does not prove that such
installations elsewhere were not used for Jewish ritual bathing. Rather, the more germane
question at Sepphoris is, what do these markers tell us about those who lived in Sepphoris?
Cf. Stuart S. Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, in The
Archaeology of Dierence: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and The Other in Antiquity, Studies in
Honor of Eric M. Meyers, AASOR 60/61 (ed. D. Edwards, T. McCollough; Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2007), 215-34.
54)
See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Rabbi in Second-Century Jewish Society, in The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume Three: The Early Roman Period (ed. W. Horbury, W. D.
Davies, and J. Sturdy; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 933-91, esp. 971,
and idem, The Place of the Rabbi in Jewish Society of the Second Century, in The Galilee in Late Antiquity (ed. L. Levine; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992),
157-74, esp. 164. According to Martin Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee
(Totowa: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 178-79, beginning with R. Judah ha-Nasi, there
was a more realistic relaxation of the stricter purity laws, especially as they aected the
farmers of Galilee.
55)
There is an underlying assumption by Goodman that the rabbis purity laws were too
232
importantly, the benei/ anshei ir/ X, who likely constituted the majority of
commoners, are perceived as interested in purity concerns, notably in tannaitic sources that pertain to miqvaot.56
Evidence of the persistence into Late Antiquity of ritual purity practices associated with sexuality comes from y. Ber. 3:4, 6c, where several
anecdotes are preserved that reect the extremes to which commoners
went to immerse. Thus we hear that the mid-second century Sepphorean,
R. Yose ben H alafta, once warned a donkey driver not to endanger his life
by immersing at night. The driver was insistent because he had adulterous
relations earlier with a menstruant, so insistent that he didnt listen to
Yose and drowned!57 Similarly, a fourth-generation amora, R. Yose ben
Yose, when sailing on a ship, reportedly warned a fellow traveler against
immersing in the sea before eating.58 We also hear that a guardian of a
vineyard and a married woman who were planning a sexual tryst were
deterred when they had diculty locating a pool of water to enable them
to immerse afterwards to remove the seminal impurity.59
These three stories might be dismissed as unusual anecdotes involving
eccentric individuals. However, the same sugya also preserves several episodes in which the practices of groups of persons are commented upon.
We hear that the wives of Galilee were becoming barren from the cold,
leading R. Joshua ben Levi to consider doing away with ritual bathing
after sexual relations. Another prominent, third-century sage, R. H anina
bar H ama, objected to those who gathered in the morning at the gates of
the baths, facetiously calling them tovelei shaharit (morning bathers),
thereby alluding to a practice which, from H aninas point of view,
belonged to temple times.60 H aninas sarcasm notwithstanding, this episode
complex and therefore unlikely to be followed. I have responded to this elsewhere. See
Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, 231 n. 59.
56)
See t. B. Mesia 11:17, 23 (benei ha-ir and the maintenance of miqvaot) and m. Miqw.
7:1 (anshei Medeva testify that R. Ishmael allowed them to ll a miqveh with snow), as
well as my discussion in Sages and Commoners in Late Antiquity, 164 and 174. See too,
173 for a discussion of the anshei Sippori in t. Mak. 3:5.
57)
See my fuller treatment of these traditions in Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent
Monolithic Miqveh, 231 n. 57.
58)
Upon reaching their destination, however, the sage informs the fellow that he was now
required to immerse. Cf. Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic
Miqveh, 222.
59)
Cf. the parallel in b. Ber. 22a.
60)
Louis Ginzberg long ago suggested that the rabbis in Eres Israel met opposition when
they insisted that full immersion was not necessary following sexual relations or seminal
233
reveals the tenacity of practices ordinarily associated with the temple

period among commoners. The power and meaning of biblical impurities
did not simply dissipate after 70 C.E. Moreover, the fact that the rabbis
disagreed as to whether a a baal qeri (one who experienced a nocturnal
pollution) had to immerse in a miqveh, in drawn water, or simply have
nine qabbin of water poured over him, is an indication of the variety of
practices that must have existed.61
Clearly, the rabbis viewed commoners as invested in ritual purity practices well into the amoraic period. This shared interest in purities evidently cut a wide swath across everyday Jewish life and is reected in the
archaeological record. It is no accident that the majority of the stepped
pools and stone vessels from the acropolis at Sepphoris were found in
domestic settings. Before these discoveries, archaeologists and historians
all too often associated ritual purity practices with the temple and with
the priestly class. It was even presumed that interest in ritual purity in
Erez Israel subsided following the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E.,
when stone vessels and ritual baths seem to have faded from Jewish life.
Even with the discovery of pools, and, more recently, of stone vessels,
from beyond the second century, we still hear echoes of the priestly interpretation of the nds. This is particularly true with regard to Sepphoris,
which was supposedly the home of a priestly course and oligarchy that,
along with other priestly interests in Galilee, led to a resurgence of
emissions, precisely because it was a widespread practice not only among pietists, but
also among the masses. For references and a fuller discussion of y. Ber. 3:4, 6c see
my, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, 223. On the tovelei
shaharit, see Yonatan Adler, Battei Kenesset Attiqim u-Miqvaot Tohorah: Ha-Mimsa
ha-Arkeologi ve-Ziqqato le-Halakhah Qadumah, Cathedra 128 (2007): 51-72, in particular, 68 n. 85.
61)
The views are nicely discussed in Adler, Battei Kenesset Attiqim u-Miqvaot Tohorah, 67-70. Adler posits a shift to a more lenient practice among the amoraim by the
fourth century. Full immersion in Eres Israel, nevertheless, persisted into the Geonic
period, at least according to a seventh-century source. Adler calls attention (71 n. 100) to
an interesting letter/responsum attributed to Maimonides that indicates that the practice
continued in Shinar and Western Europe, but it was regarded as unusual in Christian
lands such as Italy, France, and Provence. A baal qeri who was seen immersing there
would be ridiculed for copying the practices of the Ishmaelites. See Adler, 71, esp. nn. 99
and 100, who cites Teshuvot ha-Rambam, 140. Cf. R. Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam, Divrei
Yesiv, Orah H ayyim 55.
234
sacerdotal authority in Late Antiquity, a scenario I have tried to dispel

elsewhere.62
This is not to suggest that there is any obvious uniformity in practice.
Stone vessels may have been popular because of their inability, at least
according to the rabbis, to contract impurity, but we should keep in mind
that Jews may have held conicting views of the dierent types of stone
vessels and their permissible uses, especially since the Torah is silent about
their susceptibility to tumah.63 After all, a good many stone vessels were
found at Qumran, despite the fact that CD 12:15-17 and 11QTemplea
62)
See my Priests, Purities, and the Jews of Galilee, in Religion, Ethnicity and Identity in
Ancient Galilee: A Region in Transition, (ed. H. W. Attridge, D. B. Martin, and J. Zangenberg;
Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 375-402. For a recent priest-centric interpretation, see
J. S. Kloppenborg, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Saying Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 257. Cf. Cromhout, Jesus and Identity, Reconstructing Judean Ethnicity
in Q, 239. The discovery of stepped pools in agricultural and domestic settings as well as
in bathhouses and in association with synagogue structures and tombs reinforces the picture from rabbinic sources of a society in which the olive treader and the poor man gleaning as well as students of Torah and the wealthy were devoted to ritual purity in their daily
lives. Surely, these pools were not for the exclusive use in temple times, of priests, laypilgrims to Jerusalem, or, after 70, for some h averim who imitated priests or those who
wished to maintain a heightened sense of purity in anticipation of a rebuilt Temple. See
my Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh. For the recent identication of ritual baths near tombs, see Yonatan Adler, Ritual Baths Adjacent to Tombs: An
Analysis of the Archaeological Evidence in Light of the Halakhic Sources, JSJ 40 (2009):
1-19. For agricultural contexts, see idem, Second Temple Period Ritual Baths Adjacent to
Agricultural Installations: The Archaeological Evidence in Light of the Halakhic Sources,
JJS 59 (2008): 62-72. On ritual baths near synagogues, see idem, Battei Kenesset
Attiqim u-Miqvaot Tohorah. For stepped pools found in bathhouses, see Miller,
Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, 216, and 227 n. 8. See too
Asher Grossberg, The Miqvaot (Ritual Baths) at Masada, in Masada VIII: The Yigael
Yadin Excavations 1963-1965 Final Reports (ed. J. Aviram et al.; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2007), 107-9. Stone vessel fragments found under the fth-century synagogue oor at Sepphoris are discussed in Weiss, The Sepphoris Synagogue: Deciphering an
Ancient Message through its Archaeological and Socio-Historical Contexts, 309f. For a recent
updating of stone vessel and ritual bath discoveries that take us well into the Late Roman
period, see David Amit and Yonatan Adler, The Observance of Ritual Purity after
70 C.E.: A Reevaluation of the Evidence in Light of Recent Archaeological Discoveries,
in Follow the Wise (B. Sanhedrin 32b): Studies in Jewish History and Culture in Honor of
Lee I. Levine (ed. O. Irshai, J. Magness, S. Schwartz, and Z. Weiss; New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary, forthcoming). I would like to thank David Amit and Yonatan
Adler for an advance copy.
63)
Lev 11:32-33 and Num 31:22-23 do not include stone among substances that become
impure. For the rabbinic view, see, m. Kel. 10:1; m. Ohal. 5:5, 6:1, b. abb. 58a and cf.
235
49:13-15 indicate that stone vessels (in the case of the Temple Scroll, specically, mills and mortars) could become impure just like earthenware.
Hanan Eshel argues that the sect perceived stone as susceptible to impurity
only when it came into contact with oil.64 In either case, assuming that
the later perspective of the rabbis reects the practice of earlier, more permissive Jews living in Herodian Jerusalem, there obviously would have
been alternate views on the matter in the late Second Temple period.
These appear to have persisted into the rabbinic period. T. Makhshirin 2:1
relates an opinion attributed to R. Yose (ben H alafta) according to which
certain soft stone vessels ( ) were susceptible to tumah. The fact
that a tannaitic source, Sifre Num, 126, expressly considers and rejects the
possibility that the stones of a house and stone vessels were included in
Num 19:14-15: . . . When a person dies in a tent . . . all that is in the
tent . . . and every open vessel . . . shall be unclean for seven days, suggests
that there were other opinions on the matter. Corroboration comes from
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Num 19-14 which reads, and all that is in
the tent, even its oor, its stones, its wood and its vessels shall be unclean
for seven days,65 explicitly indicating that stone could be rendered
impure. One wonders whether diering understandings of the verse
existed as early as the Dead Sea Sect.66
Conicting perceptions of relevant biblical traditions certainly existed
where ritual bathing is concerned. As I have argued elsewhere, the rabbis
use the word miqveh rather loosely in reference to natural and unnatural
pools, sometimes even those that belonged to non-Jews. Yet scholars continue to speak of the pools as a monolithic institution (the miqveh) and
look to the rabbis to explain precisely how they worked.67 It is biblical tradition that provides the known instances that require ablutions, some of
which are open to interpretation. Of course, the rabbis do provide very
y. abb. 8, 11c. For a fuller listing of relevant sources and discussion, see Miller, Some
Observations on Stone Vessel Finds and Ritual Purity in Light of Talmudic Sources, 402.
64)
Hanan Eshel, CD 12:15-17 and the Stone Vessels found at Qumran in The Damascus
Document: A Centennial of Discovery; Proceedings of the Third International Symposium of
the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature 1998 (ed.
J. M. Baumgarten, E. G. Chazon, and A. Pinnick; Leiden: Brill, 2000), 45-52.
65)
British Museum MS Add. 27031 (ed. E. G. Clarke):
. . .
66)
See Y. Yadin, The Temple Scroll (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 19771983), 1:328-30.
67)
Cf. Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, 215-17.
236
useful, and at times, tantalizing information. For example, their description in m. Yad. 4:7 of the dierence between the Sadducees and the Pharisees over the ability of an interposing stream (nisso q) to render pure
water impure was preceded by 4QMMTs reference to musaqot, which
may explain why the sect seems not to have resorted to reservoir tanks to
purify their ritual baths. Even so, caution is warranted, since the semantic
relationship between the Qumranites musaqot and rabbinic nisso q is not
straightforward, as Yaakov Elman has demonstrated.68 Thus, when Asher
Grossberg attempts to explain how most of the nineteen pools at Masada
functioned as halakically acceptable ritual baths, he may be going too far.69
While some of his reconstructions are quite convincing, the workings of
the stand-alone pools, as opposed to those with reservoirs, are more dicult to explain. Of the twenty stepped pools uncovered in the northwestern quarter of Sepphoris, only one has what in recent times is called an
osar (reservoir) and could easily have functioned in accordance with
rabbinic halakah. One other pool has a channel leading from a nearby cistern to its uppermost stair, and may have functioned along the lines of
what the rabbis refer to as hamshakhah, or conduction, which allowed
drawn water to be used to ll the entire pool according to biblical law or
at least partially following the understanding of the rabbis. Both of these
pools were in existence during the time of the rabbis. Many of the remaining stand-alone pools at Sepphoris could have been similarly lled or could
have used rainwater fed from rooftop pipes, but in most instances it is difcult to be certain.70
This does not mean that these stand-alone stepped pools were not ritual baths. Rather, as I have suggested elsewhere, stepped pools belonging
to domestic settings were beyond the rabbis ability to regulate them and
were used for a variety of ritual and even profane purposes, such as rins-
68)
Yaakov Elman, Some Remarks on 4QMMT and the Rabbinic Tradition, or When is
a Parallel not a Parallel? in Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and History (ed. J. Kampen and M. J. Bernstein; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 99-128. I plan to
address this further in the report on The Stepped Pools of the Western Acropolis at Sepphoris, Israel (tentative title) that Eric Meyers, Katharina Galor and I are preparing.
69)
See Grossberg, The Miqvaot (Ritual Baths) at Masada, 95-123. An earlier, Hebrew
version of this chapter appeared as Ha-Miqveh be-Mesadah,
Teh umin 17 (1997): 389-98.

70)
All of this has been covered in my, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic
Miqveh, and will be revisited in greater detail in The Stepped Pools of the Western
Acropolis at Sepphoris, Israel.
237
ing of dishes and, possibly, clothes, as well as aquatic exercise, all of which
are hinted at in rabbinic sources.71
This is all the more reason to look to the common biblical tradition
rather than to the rabbis to understand the phenomenology of ritual bathing. That the construction of some of the Second Temple period pools
appears to accord with later rabbinic halakah does not point to the early
inuence of the Pharisees or rabbis. I doubt that the Herodians and later
the Sicarii who occupied Masada were followers of Pharisaic law. Rather,
they, like their fellow Jews elsewhere, inherited a common biblical perspective that regarded a corpse, various animal carcasses, leprosy, and sexual discharges as impure.72 They undoubtedly also were aware of the
non-priestly traditions in the Tanakh in which all Israel is commanded to
be holy, traditions in which, interestingly, the forms qiddesh and lehitqaddesh (to sanctify, to sanctify oneself ) refer to ritual ablutions in
anticipation of theophanies.73 It is unlikely that these biblical associations
of bathing in water with experiences of holiness among the people at large
were forgotten or relinquished with the destruction of the temple.
Still, when we turn forward to rabbinic evidence, it is remarkable, if
not surprising, that we so frequently hear of commoners immersing after
71)
In general, see Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh,
218, 225, and 228 nn. 18 and 20. m. Miqw. 8:1 reports the view of a Yavnean tanna,
R. Eliezer, that miqvaot near a town or a road should be considered impure since people
might have washed their clothes in them, which apparently rendered the water drawn.
Although it is likely that a natural body of water is intended here, there may very well
have been a similar temptation to rinse clothes in a more private, domestic ritual bath.
Interesting in this regard is b. Bes ah 18a, which reports the view of an early third-century
Babylonian amora, R. H iyya bar Ashi, that a woman may immerse on a festival in clothes
that were impure, thereby purifying both herself and her garments, if she had no others to
change into after her immersion. On rabbinic concern for exercising in water, which led
the sages to warn against jumping into a miqveh (t. Miqw. 5:14), see Saul Lieberman,
Mei-Aggadah le-Halakhah, reprinted in S. Lieberman/D. Rosenthal, Mehqarim be-Torat
Eres Yisrael (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991), 118-22.
72)
Cf. the comments of Licht, Megillat ha-Serakhim mi-Megillot Midbar Yehudah, 294,
concerning the common concern for purity that both the Dead Sea Sect and later the rabbis drew upon.
73)
E.g., Exod 19:10-15, Josh 3:5, 7:13-14 and cf. 1QS 3:4-5. See Jacob Milgrom,
Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB; New York:
Doubleday, 1991), 965-67 and idem, The Scriptural Foundations and Derivations in the
Laws of Purity of the Temple Scroll, in Archaeology and History in the Dead Sea Scrolls,
The New York University Conference in Memory of Yigael Yadin (ed. L. H. Schiman;
JSPSup 8; Sheeld: JSOT, 1990), 83-100, esp. 88.
238
sexual relations and menstruation.74 These physical impurities would certainly have impinged on the dynamicsand the holinessof everyday
family life. As Jacob Neusner has pointed out, the earliest stages of the
rabbinic laws of purities pertain not to cultic, but to domestic matters that
most directly aected the household and its hearth.75 These domestic
concerns certainly are evident among the tannaim and amoraim, but their
interest undoubtedly developed out of an earlier, more widespread preoccupation with purities. According to Alexei Sivertsev, rabbinic Judaism
evolved out of the sages attempt to superimpose their holiness project
upon expressions of piety within disciple circles and households that originated during the late Second Temple period.76 Others have shown how
household traditions inuenced the shaping of various mishnayot.77 Elsewhere, I have documented many instances in which household practices were
incorporated by the rabbis of the Yerushalmi into their halakic system.78
It perhaps is in this light that the preoccupation of the sages with the
regulation of menstrual laws should be understood. Charlotte Fonrobert
has produced nonrabbinic evidence that some Jewish women may have
had their own, sometimes stricter, understanding of the biblical menstrual
laws.79 No wonder, she posits, the sages characterized Jewish women as
74)
The use following menstruation is certainly not surprising to anyone with knowledge of
the modern miqveh. Yet other ritual purposes, including the immersion of vessels, have persisted into modernity and are also expressions of what Andrea Berlin calls, with reference to
the rst-century C.E., household Judaism See my discussion below and cf. Miller, Stepped
Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic Miqveh, 224 and esp. 231 n. 58.
75)
See Jacob Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 68-69. It is perhaps no wonder that the only tractate of Tohorot that we
have, in both Palestinian and Babylonian gemarot, is Niddah.
76)
Alexei Sivertsev, Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden: Brill,
2005), 215 and 272-74.
77)
Sivertsev, Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism, 212-13, suggests that
some sections of the Mishnah may represent revised versions of earlier household codes
that were preoccupied with the ideal family life and, by extension, that of the community. For a discussion of the dynamics of the household as portrayed in the Mishnah, see
Hayim Lapin, The Construction of Households in the Mishnah, in The Mishnah in
Contemporary Perspective (2 vols.; ed. A. J. Avery-Peck and J. Neusner; Leiden: Brill, 20022006), 2:55-80.
78)
Miller, Sages and Commoners, ch. seven, 339-93.
79)
See Charlotte Fonrobert, When Women Walk in the Way of their Fathers: On Gendering the Rabbinic Claim for Authority, Journal for the History of Sexuality 10 (2001):
398-415, esp. 413, who discusses the comment in Did 2:23 that Jewish women coming to
be baptized observed menstrual laws and would not pray, study Scripture, or participate
239
benot Yisrael (daughters of Israel) who followed in the traditions of their

fathers. In doing so, the sages were asserting male, rabbinic authority
and, more importantly, identity. For the rabbis of the Mishnah (see m.
Nid. 4:1-2), daughters of Sadducees who, with regard to menstrual
purity, continued to follow the ways of their fathers were regarded as
Samaritan women, i.e., as not part of Israel. Fonrobert notes that even
liminal Jewish groups had in common the biblical text so it is not surprising that Jewish women could have their own interpretations and
observations of the biblical laws. This, she reminds us, did not prevent
the rabbis, that is, the real fathers in Israel, from construing the cultural origins of true Jewish women as emanating from themselves.80
The rabbis may have viewed the daughters of Israel through a special
lens, but this should not distract us from their broader agenda as it pertained to Jewish households.81 The everyday household concerns and traditions of the entire family were central to the rabbinic agenda. Moreover,
in the Eucharist during the seven days of their menstrual period. She notes the contrast
with t. Ber. 2:13, which states that menstruants may read the Torah and study mishnaic
traditions.
80)
See Fonrobert, When Women Walk in the Way of their Fathers, 403-15. Cf. Sivertsev, Households Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism, 239-40, who sees the earliest
cases pertaining to women inspecting each other or having their mothers inspect them
for menstrual ow (see t. Nid. 6:8), as household traditions. Sivertsev regards the practices
attributed to housewives as traditions of their fathers that they learned from belonging
to a rabbinic household. He cites Cf. C. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 144-47,
who discusses the gradual imposition of menstrual restrictions by the rabbis, who take
over as the male experts in these matters. See my ensuing discussion. According to Tal
Ilan, Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Womens History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 51-84, women less frequently appear in Talmudic traditions as time goes on.
That there were dierent perspectives among the sages on the eects of menstruation is
evident from the debates of the houses of Hillel and Shammai. Interestingly, despite the
tendency of the House of Shammai to be considerably stricter in matters of ritual purity
and sexual control both with respect to men and women, when it came to self-inspections
for menstrual ow, the House of Shammai granted greater autonomy to women than did
the house of Hillel. See Ilans discussion of m. Nid. 1:1 in her Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2001), 66-67. Ilan claims that this follows the house of Shammais general tendency to grant more autonomy to women in such
matters as property rights, on which, see ibid., 43-63.
81)
See Lapin, The Construction of Households in the Mishnah, 75, where he asserts
that the Mishnah is disproportionately concerned with the movement of females, as
opposed to males, in and out of households and in and out of their association with the
head of the household. Lapin, 79-80, interestingly posits that the Mishnahs attempt to
240
by Late Antiquity, the master-disciple relationship would compete with

the father-son relationship in rabbinic thinking.82 The larger goal of the
sages was very likely a holistic appropriation of both, the female and male
members of the household into the holy life that they envisioned for all
of Israel.83 This was only natural since the household played a pivotal role,
not only as Sivertsev argues, in the late Second Temple period, but already
in the biblical tradition, that I am claiming is so essential to understanding the complex Jewish society under discussion.84 Baruch Levine has
emphasized the role of kinship, clan, and land ownership . . . in arming
regulate the household may reect the rabbis participation in a struggle over local authority in Roman Galilee that was a result of the provincialization of the rabbinic movement.
82)
Sivertsev, Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism, 239, points out that,
like women, men would have originally received a good amount of their halakic knowledge via household traditions rather than through abstract teaching. It was only once legal
discussions moved from family lore to the academy that the rabbis became more territorial about household traditions. Sivertsev cites Daniel Boyarins discussion of Beruriah,
Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), 167-96, as support, but Boyarin sees this especially as a development among the
Babylonian academies. Nevertheless, the increased importance of the (male) teacher as
opposed to the father in passing on societal values in Late Antiquity seems well-documented. See Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber and Faber,
1982), 149-50, and cf. Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in
Roman Palestine (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 341-42. Hezser builds on Browns
observations in her discussion of the relationship between rabbis/masters and disciples in
light of that between fathers and sons. Perhaps the tensions between bishops and local
patresfamilias in Late Antiquity reect a similar tension over authority within Christianity.
See Cooper, Approaching the Holy Household. On the portrayal of rabbis/disciples and
parents/children in Talmudic literature in general, see Shlomo Riskin, Ha-Yahas bein
Horim le-Vanim u-vein Rabbanim le-Talmidim: Samkhut ve-H erut be-Masoret Yisrael,
in Be-Darkhei Shalom: Iyyunim be-Hagut Yehudit Muggashim le-Shalom Rozenberg (ed.
B. Ish Shalom and A. Berholts; Jerusalem: Bet Morashah bi-Yerushalayim, 2007), 607-20.
83)
As Sivertsev, Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism, 255, sees it, rabbinic Judaism would eventually limit and arm the role of households. The rabbis
would make households objects of scholastic holiness discourse but would no longer
treat them as full-edged participants in their legal proceedings. Although Sivertsev,
272-74, asserts that disciple circles with time would supplant the role of the family in the
transmission of traditions in the great holiness project of the rabbis, he readily admits
that the everyday life of the family continued to be regarded as essential to their project.
For instances of tannaitic case-law that seem to incorporate many households into a larger
community, suggesting that the rabbis had the greater community of Israel in mind, see
Sivertsev, 269-71.
84)
Here Fonroberts assertion that some Jewish women may have had their own understandings of the biblical menstrual traditions is particularly pertinent. See above.
241
the peoplehood of Israel and its common history and destiny in the
land.85 Ziony Zevit similarly sees the organization pattern underlying
Israelite religion as based on social groupings of related persons who lived
in close proximity. The Israelite koin he claims, was therefore dierent
from the common Judaism of the Second Temple period, which was
characterized by sects that were organized according to their ideologies,
geographical diusion, political aims, and authority.86 Zevit, incidentally,
invokes complexity theory to understand Iron Age Israel, but he obviously did not realize that its application to the Second Temple period might
have led him to characterize that epoch dierently.87 The tribal connections of the biblical period may have subsided, but kinship and propinquity continued to play an important organizational role in Jewish society
right on through the Graeco-Roman period, as indicated by Second Temple period and Talmudic literature. The material evidence points in the
same direction, so much so that Andrea Berlin characterizes rst-century
Judaism as household Judaism.88 Whatever meaning was originally attributed to stepped pool and stone vessel usage at Sepphoris and other known
centers of Jewish life, they are remarkable testimony to the role domestic
life played in a complex Jewish society out of which the rabbis emerged.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the vacuum left by the
destruction of the temple was addressed, not (at least not exclusively) as
Shaye Cohen would have it, by the forming of a harmonious Grand
Coalition of sects and groups,89 but rather by the lingering and pervasive
biblical notions of purity and holiness that continued to have meaning
in the daily lives of many, if not most, Jews within their homes and
communities in their Holy Land. The interplay of purity and holiness as
85)
Baruch A. Levine, The Clan-Based Economy of Biblical Israel, in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and their Neighbors from the Late
Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina: Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium (ed. W. G.
Dever and S. Gitin; Jerusalem: W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, 2003),
445-53 at 453.
86)
Zevit, False Dichotomies in Descriptions of Israelite Religion, 229-30, 232.
87)
Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches, 646-48.
88)
Berlin, Jewish Life before the Revolt: The Archaeological Evidence. Cf. Eric M. Meyers, Sanderss Common Judaism and the Common Judaism of Material Culture, in
Udoh et al., Redening First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed
Parish Sanders, 153-74.
89)
See Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Signicance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of
Jewish Sectarianism, HUCA 55 (1984): 27-53 and my comments in Miller, Roman
Imperialism, Jewish Self-Denition, and Rabbinic Society, 353-54.
242
dened by the biblical tradition ensured the viability and vitality of ritual
purity practices beyond the temple, both in a geographic and temporal
sense. The holiness of the land and of the people of Israel continued to
have meaning after 70 C.E.90 Once the holy temple had been destroyed,
the inextricable connection between these residual notions of holiness and
the biblically derived purity laws was more acutely perceived, leading to
an increase rather than a lessening of ritual purity practices in everyday
life. Purity did not break out suddenly in Second Temple times, as is
sometimes claimed; nor were its ramications less palpable after 70 C.E.91
The late second-century tanna, R. Simeon ben Eleazar, had it right when
he pointed out the extent to which purity had spread 92 (
). R. Simeon is specically referring to household-centered precautions taken to ensure that those suering from abnormal genital or menstrual discharges not render profane foodstus impure, precautions that
apparently went beyond strict tannaitic halakah.93 The emulation of an
ideal, pure and holy life was an essential element of complex common
Judaism, one that survived the catastrophe of 70 C.E. and nurtured
nascent rabbinic Judaism.
One nal thought to bring things full circle: we began our discussion
with Satlows assertion that the unity as opposed to the diversity of Judaism is elusive.94 In a recently published book devoted to revisiting Sanders
90)
This is certainly evident in the writings of the rabbis. As Martin Jaee puts it, It is
as if, with the destruction of the physical temple, the land and the people of Israel had
themselves absorbed the invisible essence that constituted its holiness. See Jaee, Early
Judaism, 117, where he further discusses the People and the Land of Israel in the Cosmic
Order of the rabbis. Cf. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman
World, 101, who notes that produce of the land continued to be regarded as holy after 70
C.E. and tithes were still separated, despite the fact that priests and Levites no longer
functioned in an ocial capacity.
91)
Further complicating matters is the common assumption that it was exclusively the
priests who were responsible for fostering biblically derived levitical practices. Cf. the
comments of Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism 23, on the misleading use of
Leviticus, levitical etc. See too Miller, Stepped Pools and the Non-Existent Monolithic
Miqveh, 222-24 and my discussion above of the reading of priestly interests into the
material nds.
92)
As opposed to broke out. See t. abb. 1:14 and cf. my discussion of the use of pars ah
in Some Observations on Stone Vessel Finds and Ritual Purity in Light of Talmudic
Sources, 403 n. 7 and 419.
93)
Cf. Miller, Some Observations on Stone Vessel Finds and Ritual Purity in Light of
Talmudic Sources, 412-13.
94)
Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice, 288-92, further sees Judaism as
a map of the ways in which real historical communities have dened themselves and
243
Common Judaism, there are a number of articles that stress the complexity
of Jewish society, without fully explaining its ramications.95 In particular, Eliezer Segal refers to the messiness of Second Temple Judaism and
regards the older categories used to dene the period as historically
indefensible.96 Anders Runesson continues his earlier insistence that there
was overlap between the existing movements and that the tensions
between Jesus and the Pharisees in Matthew are really evidence of a split
between Pharisees who rejected Jesus and messianic Pharisees who comprised the Matthean community.97 In his contribution to this volume,
Sanders once more insists that there were not a lot of Judaisms but a
common Judaism and asserts that subgroups do not necessarily destroy
unity.98 Neusner continues to oppose those who assume that a harmonious symbolic structure of Judaism was presupposed in all documents
and by all artifacts when in reality, No evidence permits us to describe
that one [emphasis mine] Judaism.99 Neusner is incorrect; but so is Sanders. The discrete Judaisms that Neusner sees both in the Second Temple
period and behind each rabbinic document were not disconnected entities. At the same time, there was no prevailing, easily dened and unied
Judaism, that served to sustain all Judaisms.100 Commonness should not
be confused with unity. In the end, we must settle for a biblically derived,
Complex Common Judaism whose complexity is precisely what makes
its unity so dicult to describe.
struggled with their tradition. He correctly observes that undetermined practices often
originated without rabbinic sanction only later to be subjected to a web of rabbinic
meanings.
95)
Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz, Common Judaism: Explorations in SecondTemple Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
96)
Eliezer Segal, Aristeas or Haggadah: Talmudic Legend and the Greek Bible in Palestinian Judaism, in McCready and Reinhartz, Common Judaism, 159-72 at 172.
97)
Anders Runesson, From Where? To What? Common Judaism, Pharisees, and the
Changing Socioreligious Location of the Matthean Community, in McCready and Reinhartz, Common Judaism, 97-113. The fuller version of Runessons argument appeared
somewhat earlier in Rethinking Early Jewish-Christian Relations: Matthean Community
History as Pharisaic Intragroup Conict, JBL 127 (2008): 95-132.
98)
E. P. Sanders, Common Judaism Explored, in McCready and Reinhartz, Common
Judaism, 11-23 at 19.
99)
Jacob Neusner, The Iconography of Judaisms, in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, New
Series, vol. 13 (ed. Jacob Neusner; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 139-56. Neusner does
not single out Sanders in this article.
100)
See Neusner, The Iconography of Judaisms, 153-54.

Complex Common Judaism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Complex Common Judaism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Journal for

Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and other

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

regarded as Jewish identity markers. In her book, The Archaeology of

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

have put forth the notion of a complex common Judaism, particularly

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

being drawn and redrawn.24 The problem, however, is that material

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

pools31 and stone vessels. Many of the pools at Sepphoris belong to

I am purposely avoiding the rabbinic term miqveh/miqvaot (ritual bath/baths) for

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

survive [emphasis mine] the destruction of the [First] Temple.37 People

Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Pollution, Purication, and Purgation in Biblical Israel, in The

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

David Wrights understanding of the spectrum of priestly impurity

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

compromised by the very real presence of pagan institutions and the

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

that the commandment to be holy is most pronounced in priestly texts.

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

reveals the tenacity of practices ordinarily associated with the temple

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

sacerdotal authority in Late Antiquity, a scenario I have tried to dispel

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

Teh umin 17 (1997): 389-98.

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

benot Yisrael (daughters of Israel) who followed in the traditions of their

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

by Late Antiquity, the master-disciple relationship would compete with

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

S. S. Miller / Journal for the Study of Judaism 41 (2010) 214-243

You might also like