Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism

By Jonathan Klawans. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 242 pp. $65.00 (cloth); L41.50 (cloth).

This volume makes a major contribution to the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity. Professor Klawans has disentangled some confusing threads of ancient thinking about purity and has revealed a complex, nuanced array of perspectives to be found in our documentation. Those who wish to homogenize ancient Jewish thinking on the subject will henceforth be without excuse.

Klawans works throughout in an interdisciplinary way and demonstrates why such work is so important to the fields concerned. While ancient Judaism and Christianity are clearly distinct from one another and from the Israelite faith canonized in their Scriptures, they are also intimately related to one another. Trying to understand any one of them in isolation from the rest is bound to produce significant distortions.

In summary, Klawans argues that there are two distinct types of purity in the Hebrew Bible, ritual purity and moral purity. The former is seldom a matter of sin, since impurity is something one contracted in the ordinary course of life and could be relieved of through normal modes of purification. Moral impurity, on the other hand, could not be purged and its accumulation threatened the continuation of Israel in its land. This latter type of impurity is at issue primarily in the Holiness Code of Leviticus, where it grounds a theological explanation of the Exile.

The two types of impurity are distinct from one another. Moral impurity does not render a person ritually impure. Ritual impurity does not imply moral impurity and only rarely becomes an occasion of it. Their vocabulary, however, is the same; and biblical texts do not always make the distinction clear. As a result, thinkers of the Second Temple era and later found themselves wrestling with the ambiguities involved and devising different ways to relate the two types of impurity to each other.

Philo, for example, relates them analogically, treating the ritual impurity of the body as a sign of the more important moral impurity of the soul. The Qumran tradition eventually came to identify the two, so that each type of impurity implied the other and purification and atonement became two sides of the same coin. The Tannaim kept the two strictly separate, treating ritual impurity as a proper subject of halakhah and confining moral impurity almost entirely to aggadic discourse.

In turning to critical figures of the New Testament (John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and the author of Hebrews), Klawans locates them within this ongoing cultural and religious dialogue, with results that are at least stimulating and sometimes quite helpful. His conclusions afford ample occasion for further discussion among scholars of early Christianity.

The book also has certain weaknesses. In fact, there are two respects in which Klawans has made questionable choices. One is his decision to exclude food purity from consideration. This is problematic not least because of the topic's importance within earliest Christianity. Only by omitting it from consideration can Klawans say, for example, that Paul is not interested in issues of ritual purity.

The other problem that I see is Klawans's failure to be clear in his use of the term "metaphorical." He objects to regarding the idea of moral purity as "metaphorical" on the grounds that it is a highly unified and serious concept for Leviticus and some other texts. One eventually deduces that, for him, the word "metaphorical" signifies the occasional and unsystematic use of purity language in contexts where it would not be normal. This is a possible definition, but it has enabled him to dismiss the question of whence the Holiness Code derives its use of purity language in relation to sins that are not, in and of themselves, violations of literal, physical purity. This is a transferred (metaphorical) usage, from the start, which does not at all minimize the systematic weight attached to it.

Neither of these caveats detracts from the substantive character of Klawans's contribution. This is an important piece of work.

L. William Countryman

The Church Divinity School of the Pacific

Graduate Theological Union

Berkeley, California

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2003
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