Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism

Update: This video (with its accompanying blog post) was originally published in 2020, and is now the first in a series. Anyone interested in the topic of purity in Second Temple Judaism, should subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.

Few Christians today linger over the ritual purity laws in the Pentateuch. This lack of familiarity with the Torah, and with how the Torah was understood in ancient Judaism, is often combined with a profound failure of historical imagination. The predictable result: major misreadings of the New Testament.

In this 28-minute video, prepared for students in my introduction to early Judaism course, I explain how Jewish systems of purity really worked 😏: 

There are still plenty of mistakes in delivery, production and, no doubt, in content, but this one turned out better than most of the videos I’ve produced so far. (It also takes the prize for most time-consuming to prepare.) I justify its length by telling my students to watch it at 2x speed.

I should note that I make no claim to originality here. The model I present is essentially that of Jonathan Klawans with a side of E.P. Sanders.  

Comments, corrections and recommendations for further reading are welcome.

A Working Bibliography

Hayes, Christine E. Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Kazen, Thomas. Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity? 2d ed. CB 38. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010.

Klawans, Jonathan. Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

________. “Notions of Gentile Impurity in Ancient Judaism.” AJS Review 20.2 (1995): 285–312.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew Volume 4: Law and Love. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Poirier, John C. “Purity beyond the Temple in the Second Temple Era.” Journal of Biblical Literature 122 (2003): 247-265.

Rogan, Wil. “Purity in Early Judaism: Current Issues and Questions:” Currents in Biblical Research 16.3 (2018): 309-339.

Sanders, E. P. Judaism: Practice and Belief: 63 BCE - 66 CE. London: SCM Press, 1998.

Thiessen, Matthew. Jesus and the Forces of Death. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.

Wassen, Cecilia. “The Jewishness of Jesus and Ritual Purity.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 27 (2016): 11–36.

In addition to Klawans and Sanders, I found the chapter on Purity in John Meier’s 4th volume as well as the recent essays by Wil Rogan and Cecilia Wassen especially helpful. It will be obvious that I am not finally persuaded by Thomas Kazen or John Poirier. 

Could ancient Jews eat with Gentiles without violating the law?

Peter's vision by Domenico Fetti, via Wikimedia Commons

Could ancient Jews eat with Gentiles without violating the law?

It is safe to say that most readers of the New Testament (and many New Testament scholars) assume the answer is no. After all, (1) in Acts, when Peter returns from visiting Cornelius he is criticized for staying with uncircumcized men and "eating with them" (Acts 11:3). (2) In Galatians, Paul equates eating with Gentiles to living "like a Gentile (ethnikôs) and not like a Jew (ioudaikôs)" (Gal 2:12-14). These two passages seem parallel. (3) Since Peter responds to his critics by telling a story about clean and unclean food that concludes with the declaration, “what God has cleansed, do not regard as defiled” (11:9), readers of Acts routinely conclude that, from Luke's perspective at least, accepting Gentiles into the church meant doing away with the food laws.

I am not so sure. For one thing, Luke never explicitly draws the conclusion from Peter's vision or his encounter with Cornelius that the food laws were set aside. To the contrary, in the latter chapters of Acts Paul insists on his own continued fidelity to the Jewish way of life: Paul participates in temple worship to show that he “guards the law” (21:24); he also denies that he has done anything against the law (25:8) or his people’s ancestral customs (28:17).

Outside the New Testament, passages that emphasize the strictness with which some Jews observed the food laws also demonstrate that it was possible to "keep Kosher" in Gentile contexts: (1) Daniel and friends refuse the king's food and wine, requesting a diet of vegetables and water, but it was still the king's vegetables and water that they ate (Dan 1:8, 12). (2) Josephus describes a group of priests imprisoned in Rome who survived on a diet of figs and almonds out of piety toward God (Life 14). Martin Goodman concludes: "For pious Jews to eat with non-Jews, sharing a convivial table, was possible, but difficult" (Rome and Jerusalem 119).

Moreover, the food laws were interpreted differently by different Jews:

"It is important to remember that--notwithstanding many wide areas of absolute conformity--evolving Jewish law, even within the normative Orthodox wing alone, has never been monolithic. As a result, it is usual for all popular guides to the practice of kashruth (including cookbooks) to contain strong disclaimers and exhortations to the reader to consult local competent rabbinic authority at all times." - Gene Schram, "Meal customs (Jewish)" Anchor Bible Dictionary 4.649.

If this is true for Orthodox Judaism today, how much more may we suppose that there was room for variety in the first century?

E.P. Sanders explains that in addition to the avoidance of pork, food sacrificed to idols and food containing blood posed "potential problems" for observant Jews. "There are possible problems with other foods, especially the main liquids, oil and wine. A libation to a pagan deity might have been offered from wine before it was sold; oil also might have an idolatrous connection." Aside from these restrictions, Gentile food could be fair game, although "some Jews were generally unwilling to eat pagan food, even when there might be no legal objection to it." On the other hand, Sanders suggests that Paul was not the only first-century Jew who advised eating whatever was set before them without asking questions of conscience: "In 1 Cor. 10.27, Paul advises Christians not to ask about the source of food when in someone else's house, and it is most likely that in the Diaspora some Jewish families followed the same practice" (E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief: 63 BCE – 66 CE. [Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992], 216).

To this evidence, we may add a passage from the Mishnah about Gentile wine and its use in idolatrous libations, which takes for granted that Jews could in some contexts eat with Gentiles:

"If an Israelite was eating with a gentile at a table, and he put flagons [of wine] on the table and flagons [of wine] on the side-table, and left the other there and went out, what is on the table is forbidden and what is on the side-table is permitted..." (Avodah Zarah 5.5).

However we understand NT passages such as Acts 10-11 and Galatians 2, we need to set aside once and for all the idea that Jews believed eating with Gentiles meant violating the law. That simplistic assumption rests on a failure to engage early Jewish sources--and a failure of historical imagination.

Enoch, Levi, and Jubilees on Sexuality

My review of William Loader's Enoch, Levi, And Jubilees On Sexuality: Attitudes Towards Sexuality In The Early Enoch Literature, The Aramaic Levi Document, And The Book Of Jubilees (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007) is now published in the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures. In case you are wondering, this is not a book I would have selected to review on my own, but it had been a while since I was last invited to review a book, so I said yes. It ended up being more interesting than I expected.

Most interesting on the curiosity side of things is an answer to the age-old question: Did Adam and Eve have sex in the garden? Loader argues that Jubilees would answer "no" because the garden corresponds to the sacred space of the Temple, but that Jubilees does suggest Adam and Eve 'knew' each other in a sexual sense before they entered the garden. So now you know.

On a more mundane, but more useful level, I was struck by the similar assumptions about Gentile immorality in Jubilees and Paul. This is a stereotype that Jews in general took for granted.

Paul's comments about purity in connection with Christians who are married to unbelievers are also similar to the concerns shared by 1 Enoch, the Aramaic Levi Document and Jubilees about intermarriage with Gentiles. Paul, however, claims that "the unbelieving husband is sanctified by his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the brother" (1 Cor 7:14). For the documents Loader surveys, illicit marriage defiles.

Evangelical Scholarship on Jews and Judaism 1: Purity

One puzzling feature about Peter's lunch-time vision in Acts 10 is that the four-cornered sheet contained clean as well as unclean food. So instead of replying, "Never, Lord, I have never eaten anything common and unclean" (10:14), Peter might have selected a clean animal from the menu and been on his way.

F.F. Bruce suggests that Peter "was scandalized by the unholy mixture of clean animals with unclean" (206 n. 18), but offers no evidence that such a combination was considered unholy.

Ben Witherington III supplies the lack, drawing on a 1983 AUSS article by Colin House, which in turn appears to rely on F.F. Bruce (see p. 147). Witherington puts the argument this way:

"Peter assumed that because of the considerable presence of unclean animals and the possible problem of contamination, there was nothing fit to eat in the sheet" (Witherington, Acts, 350).

No evidence? No problem:

"It may be true that no known ruling specified that clean animals were automatically made unclean by mere contact with unclean ones, but it stands to reason that this was often assumed to be the case in early Judaism. It was after all assumed in early Judaism that a person incurred uncleanness by mere contact with an unclean person, and it would be natural to assume the same with animals" (Witherington, Acts, 350 n. 95).

There are at least a couple issues here:

1. Arguments about early Jewish belief should never rest on what "stands to reason" or what is "natural."
   
2. This particular argument represents a failure of imagination: Think of all the Jewish shepherds trying to keep their pure sheep from weasels, mice, lizards of various kinds, and all creatures that swarm upon the earth (cf. Lev 11).