200 A History of Judaism
The allusive language of the Torah left unclear precisely what consti-
tuted pollution. The book of Leviticus uses the word tame (‘unclean’) to
refer within a few chapters first to animals unfit for comsumption and
then to a woman after childbirth and a man with a skin disease. The same
word (tame ) was used to condemn an illegitimate marriage union: ‘If a
man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing.’ The biblical text
left space for intense disputes over very precise issues. Hence the debate
whether an unbroken stream of liquid transfers pollution upstream,
which we have seen (Chapter 6) was discussed both by Pharisees and Sad-
ducees and in the sectarian missive MMT sent from the Dead Sea Yahad
to (probably) the High Priest in Jerusalem: ‘And furthermore concerning
the pouring (of liquids), we say that it contains no purity. And further-
more the pouring does not separate the impure {from the pure}, for the
poured liquid and that in the receptacle are alike, one liquid.’^1
Many Jews in this period seem to have taken purity notions far
beyond the biblical base. The rationale of food laws in Leviticus was
that ‘you shall not defile yourselves ... you shall be holy, for I am holy.’
They had been for many Jews a symbol also of separation from the gen-
tile world. In Jubilees, composed in the second century bce, eating with
gentiles is itself seen as defiling. A taboo on the use of gentile olive oil
was widespread among Jews from at least the second century bce, so
that sale to the Jews of Syria of Jewish oil from Galilee was a lucrative
trade during the first year of the independent Jewish state of 66– 70 ce.
In Jerusalem, Galilee and at Qumran many fragments have been found
of stone vessels, used for food and drink probably because stone was
not considered susceptible to impurity. The Mishnah attributes to the
Houses of Hillel and Shammai in the first century ce an assumption that
there should be a general prohibition on eating meat and milk together
on the basis of the biblical injunction not to seethe a kid in its mother’s
milk. The wider prohibition, which has had substantial impact on Jewish
cuisine down to modern times, was apparently unknown to Philo in
Alexandria, since he took the biblical text literally and saw nothing
wrong with mixing meat and milk so long as the milk of the mother ani-
mal was not used, and the taboo may originally have been confined to
the circles of the rabbinic sages, but it was probably more widespread:
the prohibition is not singled out for emphasis in the Mishnah and the
first- century sages are portrayed as in debate over its extension to
the avoidance of placing fowl on the same dining table as cheese.
We have seen that the language of purity and pollution permeates the
sectarian texts found among the Dead Sea scrolls, where the members