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.

Certain aspects of our everyday bodily existence – like sex, and excreting waste – are deemed best to conceal from the public view. These functions are relegated to the margins and recesses of household architecture, the relevant body parts are covered and their linguistic signifiers protected by euphemisms (going to the bathroom; sleeping together). The biblical rules of pollution seem to revel in the details of these kinds of experiences, casting a spotlight on these domains, where silence seems more appropriate.

The intensity of attention to the sexual domain within the defilement discourse of the HB raises important questions that have yet to be addressed. It is straightforward to understand, on the one hand, how sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were perceived as contagious and threatening, and on the other hand to understand why sexual transgressions were believed to produce a stain of culpability that carried the threat of divine retribution. What remains to be explained is the following: why were ordinary sexual emissions, specifically semen, menstruation and birth lochia, regarded as defiling when other bodily emissions were not? In particular, according to the largely compelling view that pollution relates to disgust, one would expect excrement to be defiling, yet surprisingly one finds that P does not mention it as a source of impurity. Intriguingly, even the law of the war camp in Deuteronomy 23:10–15 (discussed below), which explicitly requires the distancing of impurity (specifically seminal emission) and excrement, treats these topics independently and does not ascribe pollution to the latter.

In biblical Israel, sex was not considered sinful, but it was messy. Yet, commerce in bodily fluids by itself is insufficient to account for the attention sex receives as a source of pollution, throughout the HB and cross-culturally. In terms of sheer messiness, one could think of numerous activities that far exceed intercourse, for example frolicking in a dung heap, which for some reason did not merit the attention of purity regulations.

The central claim of this book has been that the biblical notion of ṭum’ah is rooted in embodied experience. Closely related to disgust, it is more specifically to be identified with the experience of contagion as manifested in multiple domains of life, each type according to its own rules and ramifications. Even extensions of defilement discourse which emerge in biblical and Second Temple Period Jewish sources, including those more remote from the physiological causes of impurity, can be traced back to the various schemas of embodied existence.

As was seen in the previous chapters, the recognition that the concept of pollution (ṭum’ah) provided an account for the infectiousness of disease may resolve some problems in interpreting biblical texts related to this topic, but it also exposes new riddles, especially the seeming reluctance to openly address the infectiousness of disease. The purpose of this chapter and the ones that follow is to demonstrate that this silence is not accidental and to explore the far-reaching implications of this recognition for understanding the implicit worldview of the Priestly source.

As seen in the previous chapter, there are numerous reasons to view the treatment of disease in P as reflecting an implicit polemic against accepted ritual practices. The present chapter will expand this argument to address the role of sin as a cause of disease. Though its point of departure is the rules of ṣara‘at in Leviticus 13–14, it will reveal a consistent tension that pervades P.