Bible Study for Amateurs #74 – Elizabeth Shively’s “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” part 8

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben – the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-four of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Elizabeth Shively’s ‘Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,’ part 8.”¹

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In Mark 1:40-45, Jesus encounters a man with λέπρa (lepra) and, per v. 41, “stretched out his hand and touched him.”² Such action, some have suggested, would have put Jesus at risk of acquiring the ritual impurity λέπρa conferred.³ In Mark 5:1-20, Jesus encounters a demon-possessed man who dwelled among tombs. Per Num 19:16, coming into contact with graves caused ritual impurity and, therefore, Jesus’s interaction with the demon-possessed man risked contraction of said impurity.⁴ In Mark 5:41, Jesus takes the hand of Jairus’s deceased daughter. Per Num 19:11, those who touch dead bodies become ritually impure for seven days and so, it stands to reason, Jesus risked becoming ritually impure by taking the girl’s hand. In Mark 5:27, Jesus’s cloak is touched by one suffering from an abnormal genital discharge (i.e., “a flow of blood”). Per Lev 15:25-27, coming into contact with things such a person has touched causes ritual impurity and so Jesus’s interaction with the woman risked him acquiring ritual impurity. What do we make of all this? 

These stories (as well as the exorcism in Mark 9:14-29)⁵ are enumerated by Elizabeth Shively in her 2020 piece “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark”⁶ where she ties them “to the three sources of major ritual impurity for which the Torah provides rectifying purity rituals” (p. 69). These sources are, of course, corpse contagion, scale disease, and abnormal genital discharges. In the pericopes just mentioned, Jesus encounters an individual who would have been considered ritually impure on account of their conditions and yet he does not keep his distance from them. Indeed, in some of them he takes the initiative to make contact. Yet this raises a question that Shively too touches on: Why doesn’t the Evangelist narrate that by coming into contact with the ritually impure Jesus too becomes ritually impure?

There are a couple of ways to approach that question. The first is to acknowledge, as Shively does, the shared “cultural encyclopedia” of both the Evangelist and his audience.⁷ Helen Bond observes that various lines of evidence suggest that Mark and his readership shared a similar heritage and that “the general contours of the material were known to the audience.”⁸ For example, the author uses terms like “baptism” and “gospel” without feeling the need to clarify their meaning. Additionally, he brings characters like John the Baptist and Pilate on to the scene without much of an introduction. The call stories of Peter, Andrew, James, and John are terse and do not appear to be crafted with persuasion in mind.⁹ He freely quotes from the scriptures of Israel, treating them – sans apology – as authoritative. Finally, he uses the popular genre of biography as the vehicle by which he will communicate his story of Jesus.¹⁰ Taken together, it is undoubtedly the case that the Evangelist and his audience had read from the same “cultural encyclopedia,” permitting him to avoid spilling ink on topics about which they were all aware.¹¹

In reading the Gospel of Mark, however, it becomes clear that, despite sharing an encyclopedia, some members of the audience were missing a volume or two. For example, in Mark 7, Pharisees and scribes take note that some of Jesus’s disciples consumed their food without first washing their hands. In vv. 3-4, the Evangelist interrupts the narrative to offer an explanation as to why this would have been a concern. A few verses later, as he responds to his opponents, Jesus uses the word “Corban,” after which the Evangelist again interjects with an explanatory note defining the term. The simplest explanation for these interjections is that some members of Mark’s audience were not aware of these ideas and therefore needed someone to explain them.¹² A similar explanation holds for places in the Gospel wherein Jesus speaks an Aramaic phrase that is in turn rendered into Greek for the audience. For example, when Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter from the dead he says to her in Mark 5:41, “Talitha koum,” translated by Mark as meaning, “Little girl, get up!” This suggests that the Evangelist found it necessary to render into the native language of his audience terms from a foreign one.¹³

Given this evidence, it is entirely possible that the reason Jesus is not described as acquiring ritual impurity when he comes into contact with individuals no doubt suffering from it is because the audience would have simply assumed it, sharing a “cultural encyclopedia” with the Gospel’s author. After all, the concept of ritual impurity was not unique to either ancient Israelite religion¹⁴ or Second Temple Judaism.¹⁵ Thus, even non-Jews may have understood Mark’s Jesus to be either risking acquiring ritual impurity or actually doing so. 

Another approach to the question is related to the previous one, namely that perhaps the reason the Evangelist fails to discuss Jesus acquiring ritual impurity through contact is because it was too mundane a thing to detail. While the Markan author was certainly trying to compose a kind of biography of his protagonist, this task was not done in some disinterested fashion with an eye toward marking every single action Jesus ever undertook. Unlike Matthew or Luke, there are no narratives of Jesus’s birth and childhood.¹⁶ Should we infer from this that Jesus was neither born nor had a childhood? Of course not.¹⁷ Mark also lacks any description of Jesus laughing. Should we conclude, then, that Jesus never laughed? It’s doubtful. The Evangelist also fails to describe Jesus’s bathroom habits. Must we then believe, on the basis of that omission, that Jesus neither urinated nor defecated?¹⁸ Μὴ γένοιτο!¹⁹ Mark would surely agree with the words of the Johannine Evangelist: Jesus said and did many other things that are not written in his account of Jesus’s life (cf. John 20:30, 21:25).²⁰

A third approach is one briefly described here by Shively, though it is discussed later in her article: Jesus so embodies purity that contact with him results in what Darrell Bock describes as a “touch of reversal.”²¹ This idea is perhaps seen most clearly in Mark 5:28-30: “[F]or she said, ‘If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.’ Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my cloak?’” As Candida Moss observed, just as the woman is described as “leaky,” so too Jesus can be understood as leaking power.²² Important to note is that the Evangelist describes a unilateral direction of force from Jesus to the woman, and not vice versa. Whatever impurity the woman suffered as a result of her medical condition, it did not transfer to Jesus. Rather, as God’s holy one (cf. Mark 1:24), the power he possesses overcomes impurity wherever it is encountered.²³

To make sense of the ritual purity system, one must look to the deity standing behind it: “I am the LORD your God,” the deity declares in Lev 11:44. “Sanctify yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy” (cf. v. 45). In context, Yahweh is instructing Moses and Aaron about what the people of Israel may or may not eat with regards to animals. Writes Shively, “God’s holiness is the ground for the prohibition against eating unclean creatures” (p. 71).²⁴ While the precise meaning of the underlying Hebrew root קדשׁ (qdš) is debated,²⁵ Shively understands it to mean “set-apartness” (p. 70).²⁶ She writes, “God is holy because he is uniquely great and uniquely good. Hence, for God to dwell with Israel, Israel must be holy, or set apart” (p. 71, author’s emphasis).²⁷ And so, in various places within the Torah, Moses and the Israelites are given instructions about how to be “set apart,” often grounded in the declaration that the deity himself is holy.²⁸ “Indeed,” writes Shively, “God’s holiness is the foundation for the entire purity system and its various rituals” (p. 71).²⁹

It is on account of the deity’s holiness that those suffering from impurity are not permitted near his dwelling place. Yahweh tells Moses in Num 5:1-3, “Command the Israelites to put out of the camp everyone who has a defiling skin disease or a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with a corpse; you shall put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp; they must not defile their camp, where I dwell among them.” Writing on this passage, Jacob Milgrom noted, “[I]t is not the threat of contagion to man and his objects that causes the banishment. Rather, as the text makes amply clear, it is the threat to the sanctuary, that is, ‘the camp in whose midst I dwell’ (v. 3).”³⁰ Shively, observing that the three major sources of ritual impurity are here connected, writes that, while they are not all “essentially related,” these sources of impurity “take on meaning as a category through the corresponding rituals that God commands” (p. 71). Notably, they share characteristics with one another in terms of consequences and requirements, and they are akin to unintentional sins in that the purification requirements are the same. 

In Lev 4, Yahweh gives Moses instructions for circumstances wherein a person “sins unintentionally in any of the LORD’s commandments about things not to be done and does any of them” (vv. 1-2). There are rules for anointed priests (vv. 3-12), the congregation at large (vv. 13-21), a ruler of the people (vv. 22-26), and ordinary people (vv. 27-35). Common to all of them is the חַטַּ֥את (ḥaṭṭaʾt),³¹ rendered in the NRSVue as “purification offering.”³² This offering is also connected to those suffering from ritual impurity. 

• In Lev 14, the מְּצֹרָ֔ע (mǝṣōrāʿ) – the one suffering from צָרַעַת (ṣāraʿat)³³ – is required to bring to the priest two male lambs and a female lamb (v. 10). One of those lambs, v. 13 reports, was to be taken by the priest who then was to “slaughter the lamb in the place where the purification offering and the burnt offering are slaughtered in the holy place.” A few verses later in v. 19, we read that “the priest shall offer the purification offering for the one to be cleansed from his uncleanness.”
• In Lev 15, the זָבָ֔ה (zābâ) – a woman with an abnormal “discharge of blood” (Lev 15:25) – is required to bring either two turtledoves or two pigeons to the priest and he will, v. 30 reads, “offer one for a purification offering and the other for a burnt offering, and the priest shall make atonement on her behalf before the LORD for her unclean discharge.”
• In Num 19,³⁴ corpse impurity is remedied when, in addition to bathing (v. 19), ashes from “the burnt purification offering” (cf. vv. 2-10) are added to a vessel with running water and then sprinkled on the unclean on the third and seventh days.

Shively writes that while both the unintentional sins of Lev 4 and the various kinds of ritual impurity are “essentially unrelated physical states [that] are inimical to life with a holy God and require rectifying purification” (p. 72), one of the key differences between them is that ritually impurity is not in and of itself sinful.³⁵ But what connects the major sources of impurity together? What is so offensive about corpse contamination, skin diseases, and abnormal genital discharges? 

The answer, Shively informs us, is their connection to death. For this she draws upon the work of Jacob Milgrom who, in his commentary on Leviticus, wrote, 

Their common denominator is death. Vaginal blood and semen represent the forces of life; their loss – death…. In the case of scale disease, this symbolism is made explicit: Aaron prays for his stricken sister: ‘Let her not be like a corpse’ (Num 19:14). Furthermore, scale disease is powerful enough to contaminate by overhang, and it is no accident that it shares this feature with the corpse (Num 19:14). The wasting of the body, the common characteristic of all biblically impure skin diseases, symbolizes the death process as much as the loss of blood and semen.³⁶

While our author notes how some scholars have sought to provide more nuance to Milgrom’s contention by tying ritual impurity to mortality rather than death, she contends that the connection between ritual impurities and death is nevertheless expressed implicitly and explicitly among some Jewish groups, particularly those responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

For example, in 4Q274 we find an extended discussion of ritual impurity concerning those with genital discharges.³⁷ The opening of the text (1.i.1-4), however, seems to be discussing the מְּצֹרָ֔ע as indicated by the statement in 1.i.3-4:³⁸ “Unclean, unclean, he will shout all the days….”³⁹ But soon the discussion turns to the זבה. She is not to touch a man with a זב – a discharge – nor anything he has come into contact with (1.i.4-5). If she does, she is required to wash her clothes and herself before she is allowed to eat (1.i.5). Additionally, she is not permitted to “mingle in any way during her seven day period, lest she contaminate the camps of the holy [ones of] Israel” (1.i.5-6). More important for our purposes and Shively’s argument is what we find in 1.i.8-9. There we read that those who come into contact with impure persons like the זבה are “like whoever is impure through (contact with a) corpse.” Given how serious corpse impurity was considered to be,⁴⁰ that those with abnormal discharges are considered to be akin to those who suffer from corpse impurity speaks volumes.⁴¹

The same is true of the מְּצֹרָ֔ע. In 4Q272, צָרַעַת is connected to a רוח (rwḥ = “spirit”) who enters into a person’s body, causing one’s artery to move “upwards or downwards” (4Q272 1.i.2-3).⁴² This condition can only be reversed when a different רוח, רוח החיים (rwḥ hḥyym = “living spirit” or “spirit of life”) “goes up and down [and] the flesh has grown” (4Q72 1.i.7-8). Writes Shively, “In this case, impurity, death, and evil spirits are joined…. These sectarian texts suggest that some ancient Jews tied impurity specifically to death and the work of evil spirits” (p. 74).⁴³

What does any of this have to do with the Gospel of Mark? In various pericopes that feature people suffering from ritual impurity, Shively sees death as the common factor to them all. Whether it’s the λεπρός of Mark 1:40 whose skin condition may have made him appear corpse-like⁴⁴ or the demoniac of Mark 5:1-20 who lives among the tombs of the dead or the woman with the abnormal discharge of blood in Mark 5:24-34 whose flow of blood represents loss of life, these stories by the Evangelist communicate ritual impurity’s deathly pall. But they are, Shively contends, not without remedy. She writes,

The informed audience might infer that as the embodiment of purity, Jesus inaugurates the reign of God by rectifying, through his healings and exorcisms, that which causes the most potent disruption in the divine-human relations: death. Ultimately Mark will present the rectification of impurity through Jesus’ embodiment of purity in his own resurrection from death in the account of the empty tomb. (p. 75)

To strengthen her argument, she turns to the second phenomena “whereby the Jewish scriptures make provision for the rectifying purification of the body” (p. 69), namely the eradication of natural disabilities at the commencement of the reign of God. We will discuss that next time.

That’s all the time we’ve got this episode. I’ll see you next time! And remember, in the words of Richard Elliot Friedman, “One does not need to deny what is troubling [about the Bible] in order to pay respect to what is heartening.”⁴⁵

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1. Throughout the endnotes readers will find various abbreviations. For a list of what abbreviations I use and the works to which they refer, please see the page “Commonly Used Abbreviations.”  ↩︎
2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
3. See, e.g., R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark, NIGTC (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 118; Darrell Bock, Mark, NCBC (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 136; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 27 (Yale University Press, 2000), 208. While it certainly seems reasonable to think that the impurity cause by צרעת (ṣāraʿat = scale/skin disease) can function as a kind of contagion, one searches in vain in Levitical legislation for any explicit statement to that effect. Bock, for example, cites Lev 13:45-46 in support of his assertion, but nothing in those two verses makes that point. The reason that the צָרַע (ṣāraʿ = one with skin disease) is to live alone outside the camp is because by dwelling within the camp he is in proximity to the deity’s dwelling place and, therefore, risks defiling it as Num 5:1-3 makes clear. (Though cf. Thomas Kazen, Jesus and Purity Halakhah: Was Jesus Indifferent to Impurity? ConBNT 38 [Eisenbrauns, 2010], 112-116.) Thus, I am in agreement with Lawrence Wills (“The Gospel according to Mark,” in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, second edition, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler [Oxford University Press, 2017], 73) when he writes, ““Bytouch[ing] the unclean man (v 41), Jesus violates no commandment, and the Bible does not explicitly state that the impurity from this disease was contagious.” See also W.D. Davies and D.C. Allison, Matthew 8-18, ICC (T&T Clark, 1991), 13. This, of course, does not mean that some may have understood Jesus’s actions as risking acquiring ritual impurity, though it is surprising that none of Jesus’s opponents make such an accusation. If this scene at the end of Mark 1 took place in a synagogue as Mary Ann Beavis suggests (Mark, Paideia [Baker Academic, 2011], 54, 56) then it would be all the more surprising nothing is said of the touch. Surely this would have served as fodder for the rhetorical mudslinging Jesus’s foes in the Gospel were fond of.  ↩︎
4. See Marcus, Mark 1-8, 342.  ↩︎
5. Mark 9:26: “After crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse [ὡσεὶ νεκρός (hōsei nekros)] so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’” Shively includes this pericope under the rubrick of corpse contamination on account of both the language of v. 26 as well as the description of Jesus’s activity in v. 27: “But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up [ἤγειρεν αὐτόν (ēgeiren auton)], and he was able to stand.” The description of the boy as one like a corpse (or, better, a dead person) coupled with the use of a verb often used in the context of resurrection (ἤγειρεν from ἐγείρω [egeirō]; cf. BDAG s.v., “ἐγείρω”) evokes imagery of death and resurrection. See further Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia (Fortress Press, 2007), 439: “Although the story does not imply that the boy was actually dead, the dual expression in v. 27 attracts the attention of the audience and may call to mind the raising of the daughter of Jairus who had died….In both stories the extraordinary power of Jesus is gloriously manifested.” For a helpful chart comparing the healing of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5 with this pericope, see Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 27A (Yale University Press, 2009), 662. ↩︎
6. Elizabeth E. Shively, “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,” JTS 71 part 1 (April 2020), 62-89. ↩︎
7. On the shared social reality of writers like Mark and their audiences, see David Rhoads, “Social Criticism: Crossing Boundaries,” in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Fortress Press, 1992), 135-161. ↩︎
8. See Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2020), 90. See also Beavis, Mark, 13; David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, third edition (Fortress Press, 2012), 144. ↩︎
9. Another reason for the seemingly truncated calling narratives of Mark 1:16-20 is to demonstrate that the right response to the call of Jesus is to abandon everything and follow him. Cf. Mark 12:21. See also F. Scott Spencer, Reading Mark: A Literary and Theological Commentary, Reading the New Testament 2^nd series (Smyth & Helwys Publishing Inc., 2023), 27. ↩︎
10. Though I am persuaded by the case offered by Bond (The First Biography of Jesus) that the Gospel of Mark is a kind of Greco-Roman biography, not all scholars agree with such an assessment. See, e.g., Matthew D. C. Larsen, Gospels before the Book (Oxford University Press, 2018), 80-83, 121-145; Nicholas A. Elder, Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024), 172-184, 246-250; Collins, Mark, 42-43. ↩︎
11. Thus Ban M.F. van Iersel, Mark: A Reader-Response Commentary, translated by W.H. Bisscheroux, JSNT 164 (Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 23: “Author and intended readers have much in common, so that the communication between them can be achieved without too many problems. They have the same language (relatively simple Greek), are familiar with the same literary conventions (for example, a certain preference for the use of concentric structures), share by and large the same presuppositions (for example, some acquaintance with the First Testament in Greek), the same world-view, a similar fund of general knowledge, a number of comparable experiences and ideas, and so on. In consequence of this much can be left unsaid because it is simply supposed or implied in the text.” ↩︎
12. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 441. Cf. Matt. 15:1-2. The Matthean Evangelist finds no need to explain “the tradition of the elders” in question as his audience was likely predominately (if not exclusively) Jewish. On Matthew’s audience, see Charles H. Talbert, Matthew, Paideia (Baker Academic, 2010), 4-5; John Kampen, Matthew within Sectarian Judaism, ABRL (Yale University Press, 2019), 66-67. Beavis (Mark, 115-116) floats the possibility that Mark’s explanatory note also functions as a way to portray “all the Jews” as entertaining strange customs to the end that his audience will be discouraged from participating in Jewish rituals. ↩︎
13. See further Marcus, Mark 1-8, 363. Cf. Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1 – 8:26, WBC 34A (Word, Inc., 1989), 302. ↩︎
14. See the discussion in Gary Beckman, “How Religion Was Done,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, edited by Daniel Snell (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 351-352; Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 50-51, 74-76, 100-104; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB (Doubleday, 1991), 763-764. ↩︎
15. See the discussion in Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, third edition (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), 186-188; Hannah K. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman World (Routledge, 2001), 55; Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 76-79. ↩︎
16. Though cf. Mark 6:3: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” ↩︎
17. See Koen De Temmerman, “Writing (About) Ancient Lives: Scholarship, Definitions, and Concepts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Biography, edited by Koen De Temmerman (Oxford University Press, 2020), 9: “Although many ancient biographies capitalize on birth and death episodes as significant ingredients, others are often selective in which episodes they emphasize (and which they treat briefly or ignore altogether.” See also Bond, The First Biography of Jesus, 126-128. ↩︎
18. The Markan Jesus is obviously familiar with the digestive system and the use of latrines as evidenced by Mark 7:18-19: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not from the heart but from the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” The word rendered “sewer” in the NRSVue is the accusative form of ἀφεδρών (aphedrōn), a term that is rare in Greek literature. It makes an appearance in T. Job 38 where Job questions Bildad on why it is that while food and drink enter into the body from the same orifice, “when the two go into the latrine [ὅταν…καταβῇ τὰ δύο εἰς τὸν ἀφεδρῶνα (hotan…katabē ta dyo eis ton aphedrōna)] then they are separated from one another. Who then divides them?” (T. Job 38:3, my translation). Cf. Davies and Allison, Matthew 8-18, 534.  ↩︎
19. Mē genoito = “May it never be!” or, more colloquially, “Of course not!” ↩︎
20. On the possibility that John is alluding to written Jesus traditions, including that of Mark’s, see Catrin H. Williams, “John’s ‘Rewriting’ of Mark: Some Insights from Ancient Jewish Analogues,” in John’s Transformation of Mark, edited by Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, and Catrin H. Williams (T&T Clark, 2021), 64-65; Elder, Gospel Media, 261-262. ↩︎
21. Darrell Bock, Mark, NCBC (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 136. ↩︎
22. See Candida R. Moss, “The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34,” JBL 129 no. 3 (Fall 2010), 516: “In the narrative, the flow of power from Jesus mirrors the flow of blood from the woman. Like the woman, Jesus is unable to control the flow that emanates from his body. Like the flow of blood, the flow of power is something embodied and physical; just as the woman feels the flow of blood dry up, so Jesus feels – physically – the flow of power leave his body. Both the diseased woman with the flow of blood and the divine protagonist of Mark are porous, leaky creatures.” ↩︎
23. Thus Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 92: “Contact with Jesus, the holy one of God, causes a discharge of holiness to surge out of Jesus – a holiness that overpowers the source of impurity in the one touching Jesus.” ↩︎
24. See also John E. Hartley, Leviticus, WBC 4 (Zondervan, 1992), 163: “This theological principle is the cornerstone of the decrees and instructions found in [Lev] 17-26.” ↩︎
25. For an overview, see Philip Peter Jenson, Leviticus: The Priestly Vision of Holiness – An Introduction and Study Guide, T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament (T&T Clark, 2021), 17; David P. Wright, “Holiness (OT),” in ABD 3:237-249; H. – P. Müller, “קדשׁ”, TLOT 3:1103-1118. James Kugel (How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now [Free Press, 2007], 291) writes, “What exactly does ‘holiness’ mean? The Bible never defines it.” ↩︎
26. See also Christine Hayes, The Emergence of Judaism: Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective (Fortress Press, 2011), 37: “Holiness necessarily entails selection and separation.”  ↩︎
27. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 291: “Holy is that which most characterizes God.” See also Milgrom Leviticus 1-16, 687: “The reason that Israel must aspire to holiness is imitatio dei.” ↩︎
28. E.g., Lev 19:2-3, 20:22-26. See Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (HarperOne, 2011), 181: “[T]he closer one comes to the sacred, the more set apart one needs to be.” ↩︎
29. Thiessen (Jesus and the Forces of Death, 11) observes further that the purity system is fundamentally about compassion since “it was a protective and benevolent system intended to preserve God’s presence among his people, a presence that could be of considerable danger to humans if they approached God wrongly.” Approaching the deity wrongly is illustrated well by the story of the death of Aaron’s sons in Lev 10.  ↩︎
30. Jacob Milgrom, The Commentary to Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1990), 33. ↩︎
31. In my copy of Shively’s article, תאטח is consistently misspelled as חטאת, the mirror image of תאטח. This is surely the result of the difficulty of switching from English which is written from left to right to Hebrew which is written from right to left. As I type this note, to write תאטח I have to switch to a font known as Biblical Hebrew – SIL. This font automatically changes the direction of writing to right to left. But if I did not have this particular font setup, I would need to manually select the letters, making sure to do so backwards. There lies madness. ↩︎
32. There remains considerable debate on the translation of חַטַּ֥את. Many popular translations like the KJV, NIV, and ESV render the noun as “sin offering,” and such an understanding still has its defenders. See, e.g., Yitzhaq Feder, Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 99-101; Mark F. Rooker, Leviticus, NAC 3A (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 109-110. However, many scholars prefer “purification offering” instead, thanks in large part to the work of Jacob Milgrom. See, e.g., Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 253-254; Hartley, Leviticus, 55. ↩︎
33. מְּצֹרָ֔ע is a participial form of the verb צָרַע (ṣāraʿ). See HALOT, s.v. צרע. ↩︎
34. On the difficulties surrounding ritualistic remedies for corpse contamination in Num 19, see Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 270-278. ↩︎
35. See also Knight and Levine, The Meaning of the Bible, 181. ↩︎
36. Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, 1002. See also Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 16-17. ↩︎
37. For an exegesis of 4Q274 Fragment 1, see Jessica M. Keady, “A Gendered Reading of Purity and Boundaries: 4QTarahot A (4Q274) as a Case Study,” Dead Sea Discoveries 26 (2019), 303-306. ↩︎
38. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are from The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition, edited by Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J.C. Tigchelaar (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997). Two volumes. ↩︎
39. See, e.g., Hannan Birenboim, “Expelling the Unclean from the Cities of Israel and the Uncleanness of Lepers and Men with a Discharge according to 4Q274 1.i,” Dead Sea Discoveries 19 (2012), 38-40. Birenboim follows the work of Jacob Milgrom on this.  ↩︎
40. So Ian C. Werrett, Ritual Purity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ LXXII (Brill, 2007), 35: “The single most contaminating force in the Hebrew Scriptures, corpse impurity is described in the Torah as being dynamic and mobile.” See also Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 98-100. ↩︎
41. Cecilia Wassén (“Purity and Holiness,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by George J. Brooke and Charlotte Hempel [T&T Clark, 2019], 517-518) notes that in addition to the requirements for dealing with corpse contamination in Numbers 19, texts like the Temple Scroll (i.e., 11Q19 49.16-17) prescribe washing of bodies and clothing on the first day upon contact with a corpse. This, she observes, is in keeping with other Second Temple texts that portray such immediacy.  ↩︎
42. For more on 4Q272’s understanding of skin disease, see Werrett, Ritual Purity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 25-31. ↩︎
43. Cf. David Bar-Cohn, “Tzara’at Purification: A Vestige of Demonic Exorcism” (4.19.23), thetorah.com. Accessed 8.27.25.  ↩︎
44. See Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death, 51. ↩︎
45. Richard Elliot Friedman, The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters (HarperOne, 2017), 214. ↩︎