Purity beyond the Temple in the Second Temple Era

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) In the first line of the article on ritual purity in Encyclopedia Judaica, we read that purity is "a concept that a person or object can be in a state which, by religious law, prevents the person or object from having any contact with the temple or its cult."1 A number of more recent studies have adopted a similar view, claiming that the purity laws of Second Temple Judaism derive their essential warrant from the existence of the temple cult. In the present study, I refer to such a view as "minimalist" and argue that, in Second Temple times, there was no necessary connection between purity and the temple. I. Critique of the Minimalist View I must first attend to an important study that puzzlingly combines aspects of both the minimalist and maximalist views: E. P. Sanders's Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (London: SCM, 1990). By correcting universal misconceptions about ritual purity, and by provoking further investigations into these issues, Sanders has successfully moved the scholarly discussion of ritual purity laws and practices to a higher level. Sanders's principal objective was to overturn the view, represented chiefly by Gedalyahu Alon and Jacob Neusner, that the Pharisees applied the laws of priestly purity to their own lives. As Sanders argues, Alon and Neusner made a series of mistaken assumptions regarding both the biblical and the Pharisaic purity laws: "It is not the case . . . that the purity laws of the Bible affect only the temple and the priesthood. Some scholars . . . mistakenly think that 'the settled halakah' of purity had to do only with these, but that is not so even in biblical law."2 Unfortunately, Sanders allows the view that he is challenging to determine his options. Although he demonstrates that the purity halakah went beyond the temple, he continues to regard the sanctity of the temple as the motivating principle behind purity in general, even to the point of formulating Pharisaic practice as "a minor gesture toward living like priests." In this respect, even Sanders has not broken completely free of the minimalist understanding. He writes that, for most of the daily threats to ritual purity, "[t]he only consequence of the impurity is nonaccess to the temple."3 Others have charged Sanders with underestimating the daily impact of ritual purity. This charge is based on his comments on the impracticability of avoiding all forms of impurity and on his dismissal of Mark 7:1-23 as evidence for Pharisaic hand washing before meals. In deciding whether he is guilty of minimalizing the daily impact of ritual purity, however, it should be noted that he often uses the term "purity" when he really refers to the hypothetical application of specifically priestly purity requirements to non-priests (as held by Alon, Neusner, and others). According to Sanders, "People who say that the Pharisees handled all food in purity have not paid attention to the realities of life."4 Despite the welcome infusion of historical imagination, the difficulty that Sanders outlines obtains only with respect to the common belief that the Pharisees observed a priestly level of food purity. Given the presumed effect of their regimen of hand washing, there is nothing realistically remarkable about their efforts to "eat ordinary food in purity," so long as we understand "purity" according to a non-priestly standard. Sanders mentions that the institution of tebul yom would have answered the problem of daily purity, but he asserts, on the basis of their opposition to the "morning bathers" in t. Yad. 2.20, that the Pharisees did not avail themselves of that device frequently enough to live a life of priestly purity. By dissolving the definitional monopoly of the priestly view, however, we open the question of daily purity to resolution through hand washing, rather than immersion. It is not unlikely that the morning bathers were simply a group of pietists who consciously opposed the Pharisaic expedient of hand washing. …