preoccupations and expectations 201
of the community required purity of body as well as spirit for a life of
perfect holiness: ‘They shall not enter the water to partake of the pure
Meal of the men of holiness, for they shall not be cleansed unless they
turn from their wickedness: for all who transgress His word are unclean.’
We have seen also that Essenes extended the notion of pollution to def-
ecation. The haverim ate ordinary food in the same state of purity as
was required for priests eating tithed produce. The Gospels report Jesus
as taking Pharisees to task for hypocrisy in their concern for purity:
‘You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside
also may become clean.’^2
Ritual pollution could be ritually purified by bathing, and among
some Jews such bathing took on new significance. Identifying ritual
baths in the many structures found by archaeologists that may have
been used for this purpose is not always easy, since stepped pools did
not necessarily have a ritual function, but the number of possible pools
found in Jewish sites suggests their use was common. The Essenes prac-
tised daily ablutions, as did presumably the Hemerobaptists (‘Daily
Bathers’), a Jewish group in the first century known only from refer-
ences in later Christian texts. Most striking of all was the use of bathing
to mark forgiveness of sins by John the Baptist, as described by Jose-
phus. John ‘had exhorted the Jews ... to join in baptism ... They must
not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as
a consecration of the body implying that the soul was already thor-
oughly cleansed by right behaviour.’^3
The biblical regulations for the observance of the Sabbath proved
equally susceptible to multiple interpretations. The habit of Jews of
stopping work once a week was one of their characteristics most widely
known in the broader Mediterranean world, in part perhaps because
some Greek cities gave Jews special privileges not to appear in court
cases on the Sabbath – as we have seen, extreme allegorists were attacked
by Philo precisely for not observing this taboo. The Essenes interpreted
Sabbath restrictions with great strictness, refusing to go outside their
camps even to defecate until the end of the day, whereas the tannaim
adopted the notion of a ‘sabbath limit’ as a distance of 2,000 cubits
which did not count as forbidden travel on the day of rest. The custom
endorsed by the tannaim of cordoning off a courtyard between two
houses for the purpose of the Sabbath to allow objects to be carried into
what would otherwise be public space was an innovation not recog-
nized by Sadducees, whose lack of cooperation might prove an obstacle
if they were neighbours.