A fundamental claim of this book has been that pollution, despite being a metaphysical concept (a causal force outside immediate sensory perception), is based on concrete experience and human epistemological capacities. Yet, as an ontological concept – a belief regarding what constitutes reality – it should not surprise us that it is related to other ontological assumptions, including notions of the soul. More precisely, in reference to the model presented in the previous chapter, it will be seen that the soul, like pollution, pertains to Tier 2 in the model, the level of unseen causal forces. The initial step in making this claim will be to show how the biblical nepeš functions as a folk-biological concept. Then, in the remaining part of this chapter and in the one following, we will examine how pollution relates to the nepeš in the contexts of diet and death, respectively, tracing the effects of ṭum’ah on the soul from the table to the grave.