Purity and Pollution in the Hebrew Bible: From Embodied Experience to Moral Metaphor

Description

In this book, Yitzhaq Feder presents a novel and compelling account of pollution in ancient Israel, from its emergence as an embodied concept, rooted in physiological experience, to its expression as a pervasive metaphor in social-moral discourse. Feder aims to bring the biblical and ancient Near Eastern evidence into a sustained conversation with anthropological and psychological research through comparison with notions of contagion in other ancient and modern cultural contexts. Showing how numerous interpretive difficulties are the result of imposing modern concepts on the ancient texts, he guides readers through wide-ranging parallels to biblical attitudes in ancient Near Eastern, ethnographic, and modern cultures. Feder demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary and psychological research can be applied to ancient textual evidence. He also suggests a path of synthesis that can move beyond the polarized positions which currently characterize modern academic and popular debates bearing on the roles of biology and culture in shaping human behavior. Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright page Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgments Notes on Transcriptions and Translations List of Abbreviations Part I Setting the Stage 1 Introduction 2 What Is Pollution? Part II Embodying Pollution through the Life Cycle: Disease 3 The “Touch” of Leprosy: Diagnosing Disease between Language and Experience 4 The Missing Ritual for Healing Skin Disease 5 Diagnosing Sin 6 Naturalizing Disease: Pollution as a Causal Theory 7 You Are What You Eat: Impure Food and the Soul 8 Death and the Polluting Spirit 9 Sexual Pollutions: The Moralized Body 10 Gender Fluidity and the Danger of Leaky Manhood 11 Did Women Need to Wash? Part III Images, Codes and Discourse 12 Contagious Holiness 13 Conclusion: Naturalizing a Religious Concept Works Cited Index of Biblical Sources Index of Selected Ancient Near Eastern Sources Index of Rabbinic and Second Temple Literature Sources Subject Index