Uncleanness: A Moral or an
Ontological Category in the Early
Centuries A.D.?
JACOB NEUSNER
THE
UNIVERSITY
OF
SOUTH FLORIDA
and
BRUCE D. CHILTON
BARD
COLLEGE
I. SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS AND CATEGORY-FORMATION
Diverse Judaic systems, or Judaisms, interpret each in its own way the
received categories of ancient Israelite religion as portrayed in the Old
Testament.1 Consequently, interpreting a given system's documen-
tary representation of a category established in the Israelite writings
of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. requires considerable reflection.
Opening the Old Testament and out of its resources declaring the
meaning of an Old Testament category for a Judaism represented in
much later writings is not merely anachronistic. It also distorts the
later writers' systemic reading and adaptation of the received cate-
gory. For what a systemic construction makes of that category—not
only the selection and definition, but the very classification and the
importance accorded to one Old Testament category and not to
another—finds realization in the systemic construction of all other
categories, that is, in the composition, shape, and structure of the sys-
tem itself. These simple and easily demonstrable principles of analysis
that have emerged in the history of ideas, including theological ideas,
over the past century or so do not always exercise the influence that
they should. Consequently, even today we find harmonization where
1. The first five parts of this article were written by Jacob Neusner and revised by
Bruce D. Chilton. The sixth part was written by Bruce D. Chilton and revised by Jacob
Neusner.
64 Bulletin for Biblical Research 1
there should be differentiation, mere paraphrase where analysis ought
to take place. Opening the Hebrew Scriptures as an encyclopaedia for
first-century Judaism, people misinterpret the complexity of the Juda-
isms of that time by portraying as a single, unitary, harmonious, and
linear development the chaos of Judaic systemic formation, reconsti-
tution, and even dissolution.
These general remarks on the importance of differentiation and
analysis, the centrality of context and nuance, will not elicit surprise
and ought to be received as truisms. For who, in this day and age,
imagines a single, unitary "Judaism" emerging in a linear unfolding
straight out of the Old Testament, any more than that a single, unitary
"Christianity" is portrayed, as of its point of origin, by the New Testa-
ment? These conceptions, legitimate theological necessities, everyone
understands, impede the description, analysis, and interpretation of
the diverse Judaic and Christian systems that, leaving their detritus of
holy books, holy doctrines, and holy rites, define the tasks of theology.
A half-century or more of learning separates us from the age in which
anyone fabricated a single, "orthodox" Judaism, and we have gone
beyond the then fruitful debates of Walter Bauer and H. E. W. Turner
on the pattern of Christian truth. Yet we still have accounts of the sin-
gle, unitary and internally harmonious "Judaism" described out of all
sources deemed "normative," without regard to time and place of
composition or auspices and circumstances of promulgation, that
formed the background and setting for "Christianity." So the pretense
of one Judaism and one Christianity is maintained, as though that
single, unitary, harmonious Judaism, spun in a linear path out of the
Old Testament, were any longer accessible of description. And, more
to the point, people still open the Old Testament as the handbook for
that "Judaism" that "Christianity," even in the person of Jesus himself,
addressed.
A single author, and a single point in question, will show the
intellectual tasks that have yet to be accomplished, specifically, those
of learning how to reframe our questions in light of our own knowl-
edge of diversity and complexity. If we concede that there was a
diversity of Judaic, and also Christian, systems, and that that diver-
sity characterized not only (for Christianity) the second and third cen-
turies but (even) the first, and even ab origine,2 then we can no longer
address matters under the title "Jesus and Judaism." The Gospels
research of our day surely encourages us to speak, rather, of
"Jesuses," as much as, virtually all scholarship knows, we describe
"Judaisms." Then, of course, which Jesus and which Judaism become
2. Indeed, the theory of a single, unitary beginning itself constitutes a powerful
polemic and apologetic, as Burton Mack demonstrates.
NEUSNER & CHILTON: Uncleanness 65
the centerpiece of inquiry, and category-formation begins at what, at
present, we perceive to be the very commencement of thought.
By way of illustrating the outcome of recognizing the diversity of
Judaisms, inclusive of the Judaisms presented to us by the Old Testa-
ment, we turn to a simple problem of category-formation. It concerns
the classification or categorization of uncleanness, an important con-
sideration in the Gospels' accounts of Jesus' relationship with persons
and institutions in his time, and also a central category in Judaisms
from the formation of the Old Testament Pentateuch in ca. 450 B.C.
through the framing of the Mishnah in ca. A.D. 200. Specifically, un-
cleanness, here important, there not interesting at all, serves diverse
systems in diverse ways, and any conception that there was a single
reading of the matter is untenable. Not only so, but in one Judaism,
the Essene Judaism of Qumran, uncleanness served as a metaphor for
sin, while in another Judaism, the Judaic system first set forth in the
Mishnah (ca. A.D. 200, on the foundations of materials originating over
the prior two hundred years, some of them from Pharisees),3 the con-
ception of uncleanness functioned in an entirely different framework,
so that associating uncleanness with sin bore no meaning and made
no sense at all. Uncleanness addressed an issue quite distinct from a
moral one, which can be proven very simply. To identify the category
of a conception, address to an authorship the challenge: state the
opposite. The antonym tells us the category that guides thought. In
the Essene Judaism of Qumran, uncleanness served as a metaphor of
evil, and the opposite of unclean was virtuous, e.g., one who dis-
obeyed the rule was punished by being declared unclean for a given
spell. In the Judaic system of the Mishnah, by contrast, the antonym of
uncleanness is holiness (just as is the case, in general, in the book of
Leviticus, as we shall see presently). And virtue and holiness consti-
tute distinct classifications, the one having to do with morality, the
other with ontology. Indeed, as we shall now try to show, phenome-
nologically and also historically, in one important Judaism, with roots
in the first century, uncleanness formed an ontological category, not a
moral one at all. To explain how uncleanness is an ontological, not a
moral, category, is very simple and may be presented with heavy
emphasis:
To be able to become unclean formed a measure of the capacity to become
holy, so that, the more susceptible to uncleanness, and the more differentiated
the uncleanness to which susceptibility pertained, the more capable of
becoming holy, and the more differentiated the layers and levels of holiness
that entered consideration.
3. See Jacob Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (2d printing, augmented;
Atlanta: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1988).
66 Bulletin for Biblical Research 1
That statement clearly bears no implications whatever for whether
or not an unclean person was a sinner, or a clean person not a sinner.
For in the classification of uncleanness at hand, the opposite of unclean
is holy, precisely as, throughout the priestly code (e.g., the book of
Leviticus) the antonym of unclean is holy, far more than it is merely
clean (tamé/ qaddosh, appears far more regularly than tamé/tahor). As
we shall presently see, in the Mishnah, the more susceptible to
uncleanness a person or an object (e.g., food) is, the more layers or lev-
els of sanctification that person or edible may attain. We think that to
be "holier than thou" means to be more virtuous than the other. But in
the context of the Mishnah's laws, we shall demonstrate at some
length, to be "holier than thou," one has also to be more capable of
becoming more unclean than thou, e.g., to be more susceptible to
uncleanness in more ways or at greater degrees of sensitivity to
uncleanness, than whatever "thou" is at hand.
Throughout the Mishnah and much of its successor literature,
"
Israel
," that is, the social entity of a Judaic system, is consistently
represented as more susceptible to varieties and differentiated types
of uncleanness than gentiles, and that forms, in a systemic context, an
ontological judgment as to the ultimate being of that "
Israel
," and not
a moral judgment as to the conduct and ethical character of Israelites
or of "
Israel
" in general. That is why, as we shall see, representing
uncleanness as sin and a sign of wickedness represents a systemic
reading of uncleanness, not a broadly held conception generated by
"the Old Testament," and, if must follow, representing uncleanness as
part of a hierarchical classification of social entities likewise consti-
tutes a systemic reading of the matter. In both cases we deal with how
systems form their categories, and the way they do so is by making a
systemic statement upon, and through discourse concerning, each of
the systemic categories. What a system says anywhere, it says every-
where.
In the case at hand, whether or not uncleanness formed a moral or
an ontological category or classification, it must follow, the represen-
tation of uncleanness as a mark of sin or wickedness which requires
eschatological purification through baptism constitutes a Christiani-
ty's reading of uncleanness, not a generally accepted datum upon
which Jesus in particular laid down a judgment or to which he
responded. The Christianity that deemed eschatological immersion
for sin to relate to the category of uncleanness made its statement of
an eschatological system through that detail, as through other details,
and the representation of uncleanness as a matter of sin formed a sys-
temic statement of that Christianity, not a response to or a use of a
fact of "Judaism." There were no facts, there was no Judaism, so far as
our sources tell us, for their accounts portray their respective systems.
NEUSNER & CHILTON: Uncleanness 67
Any other reading of matters, in particular the one that sees a unitary
Judaism emerging in a linear and single development from the Old
Testament, itself being an essentially cogent and harmonious state-
ment, yields only confusion. Evidence of that fact derives from the
rather odd and contradictory representation of uncleanness in a recent
work, as not a matter of morality on one page, then as a matter of sin
and hence wickedness on the next page. Analysis will show what hap-
pens when a single Judaism, against which a single Christianity, in
the person of its founder, Jesus, is to be represented, forms the gener-
ative analogy and the formative metaphor in the mind of scholarship.
The case at hand derives from the properly well-regarded writing of
E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism. His confusion of categories yields a
manifest contradiction in his account of uncleanness as at once merely
functional to entry into the
Temple
(a trivialization that vastly under-
states matters) but also a symbolism of evil (a correct reading in one
context but not in another context). So Sanders provides our occasion
for the demonstration of the conceptual urgency, for purposes of clear
thought, of the simple propositions with which we commenced.
II. UNCLEANNESS AS A MORAL CATEGORY IN CURRENT
NEW TESTAMENT THEOLOGY
In portraying the laws of uncleanness, E. P. Sanders stresses that
uncleanness in some instances, in an of itself, is a sin. Accordingly, he
reads uncleanness as a moral category. Quite correctly, in describing
the Old Testament account of uncleanness Sanders carefully stresses
that "most impurities do not result from the transgression of a prohi-
bition, although a few do."4 He accurately emphasizes that an impure
person is not a sinner; contact between an impure and a pure person is
not ordinarily considered a sin. Once he has so represented biblical
law, however, Sanders proceeds to allege the following:
One should ask what was the situation of a person who disregarded the
purity laws and did not use the immersion pool, but remained perpet-
ually impure. Here it would be reasonable to equate being impure with
being a "sinner" in the sense of "wicked," for such a person would have
taken the position that the biblical laws need not be observed.5
That statement contradicts the judgments Sanders makes in his précis
of the biblical representation of uncleanness, except for a single matter,
which is sexual relations between husband and wife when the wife is
menstruating. That is penalized by extirpation (Lev 20:18), as Sanders
says, and represents an exception, again explicitly specified by Sanders:
4. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 183.
5. Sanders 184.
68 Bulletin for Biblical Research 1
But as a general rule, those who became impure ... did not, as long as
they lived their ordinary lives, sin. Normal human relations were not
substantially affected.6
Now in order to harmonize the judgment made here with the position
taken immediately following, Sanders gives an example, but, as we
shall see, the example exemplifies only its own case:
All the laws of purity and impurity are to be voluntarily observed. If,
for example, a husband and wife agreed not to observe the prohibition
of intercourse during menstruation, no one would ever know unless
they announced the fact. If the woman never used the immersion pool,
however, her neighbors would note that she was not observant.... Not
intending to be observant is precisely what makes one "wicked"; but the
wickedness comes not from impurity as such, but from the attitude that
the commandments of the Bible need not be heeded.
Thus these biblical purity laws, which most people seem to have ob-
served, did not lead to a fixed view that the common people were
sinners.7
In fact, the case exhausts the category; the only Old Testament purity-
law that affects conduct outside of the cult is the one that serves
Sanders's claim that being impure may be equated with being a sin-
ner in the sense of wicked.
Sanders's categorization of impurity as (sometimes) an issue of
morality leaves open the question of how (at other times) we should
classify the matter. The answer to that question will prove diverse, as
we move from one Judaism to another. No one need doubt, for
example, that Sanders's reading of uncleanness as sin will have found,
in the Essene Judaism of Qumran, a broader scope than merely men-
strual uncleanness, and eschatological immersion in view of sin, so
prominent a motif in the description of John the Baptist, assuredly
conforms to Sanders's view. But were we to interrogate the Judaism
represented, as to its initial statement, by the Mishnah, we should
come up with a quite different view of matters.
III. UNCLEANNESS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF THE "
ISRAEL
"
OF THE JUDAISM OF THE DUAL TORAH
Let us start from the negative, which may be stated simply and cate-
gorically. Not a single line in the entire Mishnah treats cultic uncleanness
as in and of itself a representation of sin. An unclean person is not a sin-
6. Sanders 183.
7. Sanders 184-85. Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan Chapter Two contains an
explicit statement in accord with Sanders's example here, drawn from the privacy of
marital relations.
NEUSNER CHILTON: Uncleanness 69
ner, therefore not, in Sanders's language, wicked. An unclean person
cannot do things that a clean person can do. We find at Mishnah trac-
tate Sotah 9:15 the following:
Heedfulness leads to physical cleanliness, cleanliness to levitical purity,
purity to separateness, separateness to holiness, holiness to humility,
humility to the shunning of sin, shunning of sin to saintliness, saintli-
ness to the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit to the resurrection of the dead.
Clearly, the unclean person is not on that account wicked, and a poly-
thetical taxonomic scheme does not permit the contrast only of
uncleanness with morality.
How, then, does the Mishnah's treatment of uncleanness identify
the correct classification or categorization of the matter? The answer is
that, for the authorship of the Mishnah, uncleanness and cleanness
form ontological rather than moral categories. The capacity to become
clean, a stage on the route to holiness as we saw, finds a counterpart
in the capacity to become unclean; the more "holy" something may
become, the more susceptible it is to uncleanness. Then to be suscepti-
ble to varieties and differentiated forms of uncleanness is a mark of,
not sinfulness but, holiness. That conception finds no place in Sand-
ers's representation of matters. And yet, as we shall now show in a
very specific case, it is fundamental to the concrete legislation of the
Mishnah's authorship, a position so profound in its implications as to
mark as simply beside the point the allegation that an unclean person
was, or could be construed as, a sinner or wicked.
Let us consider two concrete cases that demonstrate the deep lay-
ers of thought on the hierarchization of uncleanness and holiness in
the Mishnah's system. Both of these statements will show us two facts.
First, that the opposite, for the authorship of the Mishnah, of unclean
was not clean but holy. Second, that the synonym for unclean was not
sinful or wicked but something of an ontological, that is, in context,
hierarchical, ordering of matters. That forms the key to the identifica-
tion as ontological of the matter at hand, the conception that through
capacity to become unclean, on the down side, and holy, on the up
side, we hierarchize the entities before us, e.g., gentiles and "
Israel
,"
or common food and food that has been designated as tithe, priestly
rations ("heave offering") and even Most Holy Things of the
Temple
altar itself. The first case derives from the very matter in which we
shall presently, in later writings of the same system, find a moral
dimension, namely, "leprosy." What we find here is a simple state-
ment that the more susceptible a person to uncleanness, the more cap-
able that person is of warding off the effects of uncleanness. The
second case, offered in the next section, then will give us a richer per-
ception of what is at stake in the simple assertion of correspondences
70 Bulletin for Biblical Research 1
with which we now deal. The reader will want to see the entire matter
as it is set forth in the Mishnah and successor writings, even though
the operative language is presented only in italics at the end. The ver-
sion of the matter at Mishnah tractate Negaim 13:10 is as follows:
13:10 F. If he was standing inside [an unclean house] and put his hand
outside with his rings on his fingers, if he remained there a
sufficient interval to eat a piece of bread, they are unclean.
G. [If] he was standing outside and put his hand inside with his
rings on his fingers
H. R. Judah declares [the rings] unclean forthwith.
I. And sages say, "Until he will remain long enough to eat a piece
of bread."
J. They said to R. Judah, "Now if when his entire body is un-
clean, he has not made what is on him unclean until he re-
mains a sufficient time to eat a piece of bread, when his entire
body is not unclean, should he not render unclean that which
is on him only after he remains a sufficient time to eat a piece
of bread"?
To this point we have no account of
Judah
's thinking and therefore
no reason to see the pertinence of the case to the principle we claim to
locate here. To see what is at stake, we turn forthwith to the Tosefta's
amplification of the matter. We present the operative language in
italics:
K. Said to them R. Judah, "We find that the power of him who is un-
clean is stronger in affording protection than the power of him who is
insusceptible to uncleanness.
L. "Israelites receive uncleanness and afford protection for clothing in
the diseased house. The gentile and the beast, who do not receive un-
cleanness, also do not afford protection in the diseased house"
[T. Negaim 7:9].
The Tosefta's authorship's amplification on
Judah
's reasoning pro-
vides the statement of correspondence and contrast, that is, of what is
at stake, that we require. The reader will rightly ask why we maintain
that the Tosefta's reading of the Mishnah's representation of
Judah
's
view may be imputed to the Mishnah's authorship's conception, and
the answer is, we can show that elsewhere the Mishnah's authorship
on its own presents precisely that view, only in a much more subtle
and complex statement. So we beg the reader's indulgence.
To this point, we have offered only a statement of the single prop-
osition that the opposite of unclean is holy, and the synonym of
unclean is not sinful but outsider or gentile. The entire composition as
it is represented by the authorship of Sifra, which cites the Mishnah
and the Tosefta verbatim and then joins the whole to an exegetical
NEUSNER & CHILTON: Uncleanness 71
framework, makes that point explicit, since it introduces the beast and
the gentile as operative categories, and neither the beast nor (by sys-
temic analogy) the gentile forms a moral category, but only an onto-
logical one. We give the Mishnah in bold-face type and the Tosefta in
italicized bold-face type, to make clear the sequence of unfolding and
underline still later work of the authorship of Sifra:8
7. A. Might one think that the beast and the gentile afford protection
to garments in the diseased house?
B. Scripture says, "He will launder the garments" (Lev 14:47)—as
an inclusionary clause.
C. He whose clothing can be rendered unclean affords protection to
clothing in the diseased house.
D. The beast and the gentile are excluded from the rule, for their
clothing is not made unclean, and they do not afford protection
for clothing in the diseased house.
E. In this connection sages have said:
F. If he was standing inside and put his hand outside with his
rings on this fingers, if he remained there a sufficient interval
to eat a piece of bread, he is unclean.
G. [If] he was standing outside and put his hand inside with his
rings on his fingers
H. R. Judah declares [the ring] unclean forthwith.
I. And sages say, "Until he will remain long enough to eat a
piece of bread."
J. They said to R. Judah, "Now if when his entire body is un-
clean, he has not made what is on him unclean until he re-
mains a sufficient time to eat a piece of bread, when his entire
body is not unclean, should he not render unclean that which
is on him only after he remains a sufficient time to eat a piece
of bread" [M. Neg. 13:10]?
K. Said to them R. Judah, "We find that the power of him who is
unclean is stronger in affording protection than the power of
him who is insusceptible to uncleanness.
L. "Israelites receive uncleanness and afford protection for cloth-
ing in the diseased house. The gentile and the beast, who do not
receive uncleanness, also do not afford protection in the dis-
eased house [T. 7:9].
Now to review the main point: the most important language is
Judah
's assertion that a person who is more susceptible to uncleanness
also affords greater protection from uncleanness than a person who is
not. If sraelites are susceptible to uncleanness, they also can afford
protection for clothing. Gentiles or beasts, insusceptible to the
uncleanness of "leprosy," entering the afflicted house will forthwith
8. This sequence, Mishnah, which begat the Tosefta, which begat the Sifra and
Sifrés, of course does not work everywhere in the later writings. But it does work here.
72 Bulletin for Biblical Research 1
produce contamination for garments or sandals which they may be
wearing, even though they themselves are not susceptible to this form
of uncleanness at all. What has all this to do with morality? Nothing
whatsoever. The focus, the issue, these concern one's state or condi-
tion in an utterly abstract world of relationships that are intangible
and unseen, yet, withal, critical. When Sanders correctly says that
uncleanness has nothing to do with morality, he may point to a pas-
sage such as this one. Let us turn to what is at stake in what is clearly
a set of ontological distinctions and points of differentiation.
IV. UNCLEANNESS AND HOLINESS IN THE MISHNAIC
STRATUM OF THE JUDAISM OF THE DUAL TORAH
Judah
's position is personal, hence not normative. But the principle
that he expressed in finding a hierarchical relationship between the
capacity to receive uncleanness and the capacity to afford protection
presents a very important and explicit statement of the matter at
hand. In what follows we shall find a clear hierarchization of sanctifi-
cation in terms of capacity to receive uncleanness, and the hierar-
chization is the premise of discourse, not the private opinion of one
party, hence built into the normative structure of the legal-theologi-
cal system of the Mishnah. What we shall now see in a still less acces-
sible case is that the greater one's susceptibility to uncleanness, the
more exalted one's capacity for sanctification. To state the proposition
in more abstract language, such as ontology demands: the greater the
capacity for differentiation, the higher the potential of consecration.
This fundamentally ontological principle of hierarchization is ex-
pressed in the detail of a legal case, and we shall have to work our
way through the details of the case to see how profoundly imbedded
in the law is the conception of a hierarchical, or rather, hierarchizing,
ontology that is fundamental to the system at hand. This case then
will leave no doubt whatsoever that uncleanness for the system at
hand, that is, the systemic statement of the Mishnah in particular,
forms in no way a moral, but only an ontological category. The sys-
tem as a whole, which proposes a hierarchizing ontology expressed
through sanctification, then makes its statement here, as it will, uni-
formly, at all other relevant points. And to that system, the concep-
tion of uncleanness as a metaphor for evil is simply beside the point,
monumentally irrelevant.
We see this in a discussion of the several removes from a source of
uncleanness and how they affect food in several degrees of consecra-
tion or sanctification. Once more we turn first to the text, then to the
exposition, of Mishnah-tractate Tohorot 2:2-7.
NEUSNER & CHILTON: Uncleanness 73
Mishnah-Tractate Tohorot 2:2:
A. R. Eliezer says, "(1) He who eats food unclean in the first remove is
unclean in the first remove;
"(2) [he who eats] food unclean in the second remove is unclean in
the second remove;
"(3) [he who eats] food unclean in the third remove is unclean in the
third remove."
B. R. Joshua says, "(1) He who eats food unclean in the first remove
and food unclean in the second remove is unclean in the second re-
move.
"(2) [He who eats food] unclean in the third remove is unclean in the
second remove so far as Holy Things are concerned,
"(3) and is not unclean in the second remove so far as heave-offering
is concerned.
C. "[We speak of] the case of unconsecrated food
D. "which is prepared in conditions appropriate to heave offering."
Mishnah-Tractate Tohorot 2:3:
A. Unconsecrated food:
in the first remove is unclean and renders unclean;
B. in the second remove is unfit, but does not convey uncleanness;
C. and in the third remove is eaten in the pottage of heave-offering.
Mishnah-Tractate Tohorot 2:4:
A. Heave-offering:
in the first and in the second remove is unc