In the wake of Mary Douglas's ground-breaking analysis of ritual purity, advanced studies of the sacred and profane have burgeoned in recent decades. Yet despite this substantial attention, new breakthroughs have become increasingly rare. Scholarly interest converges on the stringent purity regulations witnessed in the sectarian texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and invariably also on the construction of social boundaries, where issues of ethnicity, identity, and intermarriage are recalled in the Priestly and Deuteronomic writings. Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible—a revised doctoral dissertation, supervised by Peter Machinist at Harvard—is one such rare gem.
This fresh treatment explores how representations of purity and pollution inform sexual contamination, where a rhetoric of “disgust terminology,” is employed extensively by the biblical scribes. This language reflects the inherent conception of a woman as property, whose sexuality belongs exclusively to her husband, or in the case of an unmarried daughter, to her father. On this basis, Eve Levavi Feinstein clarifies how all women are susceptible to contamination through illicit sexual relations with other men. The underlying cultural presumption is that such acts endanger both patriarchal authority and genealogical integrity. These core values are identified in the law of the sotah (suspected adulteress) in Numbers 5:11–31; in prophetic exhortations including Jeremiah 2:23, Ezekiel 23:3–13, and Hosea 5:3 and 6:10; in the provision for the restoration of marriage in Deuteronomy 24:1–4; and in the Priestly marriage restrictions from Leviticus 21:7 and 13–15, etc. Feinstein's accompanying insights on the relations between Dinah and Shechem fully corroborate Bernard Jackson's observations in his work on “Seduction,” in Wisdom Laws: A Study of the Mishpatim of Exodus 12:1–22:16 (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 367–383.
This analysis is then followed by a detailed examination of “Leviticus 18 and the Sexual Pollution of Men,” which illustrates how the Holiness legislation of the Pentateuch applies pollution language to men who engage in transgressive sexual relations, and also to those who have inappropriate sexual emissions. This, Feinstein maintains, was intended to enforce the idea that male bodily purity is a prerequisite for individual and communal holiness: a desire that had a profound impact on the values presented in the books of Ezekiel and Ezra—even though (as she rightfully acknowledges) the Holiness Code prohibitions may not have been universal at the time of Ezekiel's writing. Here, the author develops her view that Ezekiel—the only prophet in the Hebrew Bible who attributes polluting power to sin itself, and whose message is characterized by his graphic representation of the people as a corrupting and lascivious woman—persists in representing sexual pollution as a condition that affects women exclusively, and not men. For Ezekiel Israel and her men are polluted through the medium of metaphor, via the image of the sexually unconstrained and contaminating female. In this symbolic conception it is the collective weight of Israel's sins (incurred by illicit female intercourse) that brings about the Babylonian exile.
A rather different slant is adopted by the writers of Ezra-Nehemiah, who depict sexual pollution as emanating entirely from intercourse with foreign women, which then contaminates the corporate body of the people. The argument throughout is compelling: “Ezra's image of a land defiled from one end to another by abominable people lends the polemic against intercourse with foreigners a visceral dimension. In all these texts, appeals to instinctual aversion to bodily contamination lend their polemics a power and sense of absoluteness that could not be attained through rational argument alone” (157).
The fluency of Feinstein's treatment is, on occasions, interrupted by a few minor distractions: First, she has provided her own English translations of the biblical texts, although her reasons for this are not clarified—even in the opening preface, where “source-critical assumptions” (xi–xii) are explained. The difficulty is that these sometimes appear either idiosyncratic or inaccurate. For example, Leviticus 11:43, אל־תשקצו את־נפשתיכם (“You shall not draw abomination upon yourselves,” according to the NJPS), is rendered as “do not make your throats abhorrent” (21). Equally inconsistent are the explicit translations of male genitalia (notably in Leviticus 18:20, 23, etc.), in light of the fact that the biblical scribes consistently employed euphemisms for these body parts at all times. This necessitates double-checking Feinstein's English translations with the masoretic text when the Hebrew is not provided in her discussion. Second, the inconvenience of endnotes (rather than footnotes at the bottom of each page), together with the omission of several chapters' subheadings from the main contents page is unfortunate. A prospective reader briefly glancing at the volume's table of contents would miss, for example, the valuable excursus on “the language of virginity” (89–91), and entire sections, including “Boundaries of the Body, Boundaries of the Self,” among others.
By far Feinstein's most incisive contribution is her refinement of the simplified assumption that the biblical purity laws were never intended to reinforce the subordination of the laity to the priests, or of women to men, since both sexes were susceptible to contamination, a position advanced by Jonathan Klawans (in “Concepts of Purity in the Bible,” in The Jewish Study Bible, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Z. Brettler, 2nd ed. [Oxford: OUP, 2014], 1998–2005). Although collectively, the biblical constructions of pollution do transcend concerns of paternity and property (99), this view should be tempered by the fact that the biblical language of contamination is weighted overwhelmingly against women, who appear as passive receptors, rather than active perpetrators, in the relevant laws (as Feinstein concludes, “Men pollute, females are polluted,” on p. 159). Moreover, the manipulation of female imagery in Ezekiel highlights the extent to which the Bible's (later) male scribes did not simply reinforce their ontological gender bias, but vilified the image of all women, holding them symbolically responsible for the transgressions of the entire nation. Consequently although the biblical purity and pollution regulations were never designed, ab initio, to affirm preexisting patriarchal hierarchies, they actively exacerbate women's subordination, thereby reinforcing a deeply prejudicial view of female worth. The impact of this bias in the Greco-Roman period, with its aggressive overpowering of the more gender-neutral biblical tradents, should not be underestimated. To what extent these representations functioned as a paradigm for reconfiguring ancient Israel's powerlessness, defeat, and subordination by the conquering Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires (as Tikva Frymer-Kensky suggested in Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories [New York: Schoken, 2002]) does not negate the force of this prejudice.
This informative account of sexual defilement is enhanced by comprehensive appendices that highlight related issues, including “Borderline Pollutants: Feces and Blood.” Such additions enable the volume to function also as a convenient reference work for these related topics. The analysis of the biblical sources complements recent the state-of-art discussions, notably, Paul Heger's Women in the Bible, Qumran, and Early Rabbinic Literature: Their Status and Roles, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 110 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), whose treatment of female sexual pollution is confined to “Genealogy and Holiness of Seed in Second Temple Judaism: Facts or Creative Supposition?” (302–340). Feinstein's monograph provides a valuable illumination of the prehistory of purity disputes (which would become rife by the first century CE), and will be of immense benefit to Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, together with historians of early Judaism and Christianity alike.
