Ritual And Morality: The Ritual Purity System And Its Place In Judaism

Contents The book does not have following pages 221-231. pagt Prifau Aclmowltdgm~llls •• \'11 x List rif abbrrviations • Xl I The sources o f impurity: th e huma n corpse 2 The corpse in the tent: an excu r SLIS 3 The sou rces of impu rity: menstruation The sources of impm-ity: chi ldb inh: the zabal, and zab 5 Norma l em ission of semen 6 An imals and purity 7 Impu riry and sacrifices 8 The Red Cow: th e paradoxes ~ 9 The Red Cow a nd lIidda/t 10 Leprosy I I The pu r ificatio n of th e lepe r 12 Corpse a nd le per: an excursus 13 Ritual purity in the New Testam ent 14 ~ I ilgrom on purity in lhe Bible IS From demons to elh ics 16 Ritual purity a nd morality Appendix A The Iwht'Tim Append ix B The rabbin ic sys tem of grades of impurilY 4 Rtfirenus Jlldtx P- 466). Whatever may be the case in the biblical context (and Milgrom's theory is far from proved, see chapter 14), Neusner's theory that corpse-pollution is to be regarded in a rabbinic context as a 'viscuous (sic) gas' is far too simple-minded. He arrived at this physical explanation, which he attributed in a literal way to the rabbis as part of their thinking on pollution, by considering the way pollution behaves in a tent; but he failed to consider how distance-pollution behaves in the absence of a tent, regarding this as quite a separate issue, or hardly an issue at all. The reason why he thought that the gas was 'viscous' was that it needs an aperture of a square handbreadth to escape from one room to another. A thin kind of gas might escape through a smaller aperture; consequently, corpse-pollution Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Groningen, on 29 Nov 2017 at 09:35:44, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2010 https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582707.003 The corpse in the tent: an excursus 21 must be a thick gas. This is entirely the wrong way to think about the matter. The whole point is 'When do we consider two adjacent tents to be connected, thus forming a single legal entity?' The answer was 'When they are connected by a nonnegligible aperture.' The legal definition of non-negligible is in general a square handbreadth; anything smaller does not count as a viable connecting aperture, capable of turning two rooms into one. Yet this general measurement can change if an element of intention enters the matter. If the opening was put there intentionally as a means of connecting the two rooms (e.g. a small hole for conveying light from one room to the other), then the two rooms can be reckoned as one even if the aperture is less than a square handbreadth in size. The thickness or thinness of the 'gas' is not the point. It is a matter of the architecture of the two rooms.4 Failing to understand this, Neusner is puzzled by the introduction of 'intention', which he calls 'an insoluble problem' (p. 250). He would like to regard 'intention' as one of the latest (Ushan) features of the law of tents, but is forced by the evidence to admit it as early (p. 251).5 When two rooms are connected in such a way as to make them legally one, then the corpse lying in one room is also lying in the other, and so the pollution that scripture ordains as affecting the room now affects both rooms. This case of connected rooms, in fact, shows that even in relation to tentpollution, the rabbis did not think of pollution in terms of physical materiality. They thought merely in terms of applying and defining the scriptural terms involved. Pollution was not some substance that crept around rooms. It was a state or condition of people or vessels that were situated, together with a 4 5