Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: The State of the Discussion and Future Perspectives

This essay (published Open Access) offers a synthesis of several key issues in the study of purity and pollution in the Hebrew Bible in light of recent research. We start from the premise that current scholarly debates need to (a) better acknowledge the complexity of the sources we have for purity and impurity in the Hebrew Bible, and (b) focus not only on describing the concepts and rituals of pollution and purification in the Hebrew Bible but also on exploring what these texts sought to achieve; that is, the degree to which they encoded power relations, ritual agency, and cosmologies. We argue that the study of purity and pollution in the Hebrew Bible requires a methodology that combines philological and sociohistorical exegesis with the findings of anthropology and ritual theories, while also seeking to position the biblical purity materials within their larger West Semitic and Western Asian context. The first part of the essay identifies the key terms and sources for studying pollution and purification in the Hebrew Bible: the genre of these materials, their processes of textualization, their relationship with ritual performance in ancient Israel, as far as this can be reconstructed, as well as the evidence of their earliest reception. The second part considers broader interpretive issues, such as the differences between “physical” and “moral” impurity in the Hebrew Bible, the forms of power and agency the biblical purity texts encoded, the degree to which concepts of purity in the Pentateuch might be said to form a comprehensive system, and the role of meaning and symbolism within this system. The conclusion considers the implications of this analysis for future studies of purity and pollution in biblical studies.