Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah

Five Studies

E. P. Sanders, E.P. Sanders

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781506406091
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506408163
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In this volume E. P. Sanders presents five studies that advance the re-examination of the nature of Jewish law that he began in Jesus and Judaism (Fortress Press, 1985). As usual, he is able to shed new light on old questions and demonstrate that many accepted interpretations are misguided.M

A chapter on “The Synoptic Jesus and the Law” considers how serious the legal issues discussed between Jesus and his opponents would have been, had they been authentic. Two chapters explore whether the Pharisees had oral law, and whether they ate ordinary food in purity (the thesis of Jacob Neusner). A study of Jewish food and purity laws in the Greek-speaking Diaspora bears on the particular point of law which led to the argument between Peter and Paul at Antioch. At last, Sanders turns to a pointed essay that sets his own approach to rabbinic traditions and the Mishnah in distinct contrast from that of Jacob Neusner. A new preface points to the enduring contribution of these compelling and influential studies.

3

Did the Pharisees Eat Ordinary Food in Purity?

A. INTRODUCTION

Scholars are almost unanimously of the opinion that the Pharisees ate ordinary food at their own tables as if they were priests in the temple. One may name in favour Louis Finkelstein, Joachim Jeremias, Gedalyahu Alon, Emil Schürer/Geza Vermes and Jacob Neusner. Ellis Rivkin disputed the view, on the grounds that the Pharisees were not ḥaberîm (‘associates’, anglicized as haverim), though he has not objected to depicting the haverim as lay people who treated their food as if they were priests. In previous work I have taken basically the same line as Rivkin, though noting that rabbinic literature does not depict the haverim as accepting all the priestly laws of purity and that not all the post-70 Rabbis were haverim.^[1]

The principal intention here is to review the arguments of Jacob Neusner. The evidence on the basis of which Finkelstein, Jeremias and Alon came to this view of the Pharisees is quite different from the evidence used by Neusner. My conclusion, to anticipate, is that Neusner’s standards for collecting evidence mark a distinct advance, but that he misinterpreted his own material. Use of his analytical work leads to other conclusions about the Pharisees than the ones which he drew.

The topic posed by the title of this essay is the crucial one of the group’s definition: did they pretend to live like priests? Is that what Pharisaism was basically all about? In Neusner’s work, this topic and the more general one, ‘Pharisaic rules and debates about purity’, merge, since he claimed that their purity rules focused almost exclusively on their own food. Once it is shown that this claim is not true, we shall see a broader range of purity issues than ‘ordinary food in purity’. The first aim of the essay is to answer the question of definition, but this will lead to a discussion of virtually all the pharisaic purity debates, whether dealing with ordinary food or not.

It will take a bit of time to get to Neusner and the rabbinic evidence for Pharisaism. To understand the Pharisees’ practice, we must know what is and what is not in the Bible: it is helpful to know that they followed the Bible when they did so, but crucial to know when they ignored it, got around it by clever exegesis, moderated it or went beyond it. On the present topic, they are said to have extended priestly laws to the laity. It follows that we must know what they were. Which laws in the Bible apply only to the priests and the temple? Which were to govern all Israel? Which, of those important later, are not in the Bible at all? Can they be construed as adaptations of priestly practice?

Answers to these questions are harder to obtain than one would expect. We cannot, for example, simply open the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible to ‘Clean and unclean’ or the Encyclopaedia Judaica to ‘Purity and Impurity, Ritual’ and find out what we want to know. Neither article even mentions the distinction of the priesthood from the laity in terms of purity. Priestly purity is covered under ‘Priests and Priesthood’ in Enc. Jud., but not under ‘Priests and Levites’ in IDB; and the Enc. Jud. does not deal with food laws in its section ‘Holiness of the Priesthood’. The IDB article on ‘Clean and unclean’ does not mention the very important laws of Lev. 11.32–38, and the Enc. Jud. article on ‘Purity’ mentions only one of their aspects (vol. 13, col. 1406). There is a partial survey of biblical purity laws in ch. 1 of Neusner’s The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (1973), but it deals with only a few of the necessary topics.

It will turn out that Alon’s argument founders in part because he took Lev. 11.32–38 to be a priestly law. Neusner made the same mistake, and elaborated on it. Similarly Alon discussed the topic of handling (as distinct from eating) secular food in purity as an innovation^[2] (which it would have been, had it been practised), but he did not note that handling the priests’ food in purity was itself a major innovation. This quick and partial review shows that we must attend to the biblical laws first. I do not wish to propose that the information could not be dredged out of secondary literature if one cast one’s net widely enough, but since it is not readily available I have decided to present the biblical material in enough detail to allow the discussion of pharisaic debates to be related to it.

Our procedure will be to take up biblical purity laws (B); to review briefly scholarly arguments prior to Neusner, especially Alon’s, but paying some attention also to Rivkin (C); then to analyse Neusner’s evidence and argument (D). This will lead us to a new summary of pharisaic purity laws (E). (F) and (G) will draw consequences and offer a summary.

Three preliminary explanations need to be given.

1. In discussing biblical law, I shall try to read it as it was read in the first century: all of apiece, almost all to be observed—‘almost’, since some laws were reinterpreted and some became ‘dead letters’, as we shall see. For the most part first-century Jews took the entire Bible to be applicable to their own existence, and the Pharisees are noteworthy in this respect. I shall not discuss the reasons for which biblical books disagree with one another, and especially not the chronological stratification of the Pentateuch, since first-century Jews were unaware of it. One clearly sees divergent views, some intentionally reversing others (thus tithes in Deuteronomy versus tithes in Numbers, Leviticus and Nehemiah—or the other way around). First-century practice either ignored one of the competing laws or conflated them.

2. I shall use ‘purity’ and cognates rather than ‘cleanness’ and cognates for t-h-r, and ‘impurity’ for t-m-’—except where quoting the Mishnah or the Hebrew Bible (‘Old Testament’), when the translations of Danby and the RSV will be followed, unless noted otherwise. The application of purity language to moral behaviour^[3] does not here come into question, and the discussion is about ‘ritual’ purity—a term which I shall comment on below.

3. Throughout this essay I shall speak about ‘the Pharisees’, in accord with the Neusner of Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees Before 70 (1971). He has become increasingly reluctant to use that designation for the people pointed to in these traditions. Thus in A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities XXII (1977), he wrote that ‘referring to the earliest stages of Mishnah as pharisaic is for convenience’ sake only’, and that ‘only with grave reservations have we alluded to the Pharisees as the point of origination or even as the sect which principally stands behind the system transmitted through successive generations to the authorities of 70 and afterward’ (p. 108). In Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (1981), he was more reluctant yet: the earliest group in the Mishnah was centred on its own food and purity, but ‘much which is written about the Pharisees [by ancient authors] does not appear to describe a holiness sect or an eating club at all.’ ‘. . . we are not even sure we can call the group by any name more specific and definitive than group, for instance a sect’ (pp. 70–71). Despite this, he called the group a sect over and over in the same work.

The point of his hesitation about the name of the group behind the earliest layer of rabbinic material is that his description of that group does not coincide with the description of the Pharisees in other ancient sources. The problem, however, is not the title of the group behind early rabbinic passages, but his description of it. My own view is that there is no conflict between the earliest stratum of the Mishnah (as Neusner defines it) and the descriptions of the Pharisees in Josephus. It is certainly true that Josephus does not discuss them as a pure food club; but that is not what is implied by the earliest rabbinic evidence, as this essay intends to show.

B. BIBLICAL PURITY LAWS

§1. Biblical law requires that some food be eaten in purity. The priests and their families were required to eat some or most of their food in purity. This food can be divided into two categories: (1) individual offerings of sacrificial animals (which were sometimes accompanied by cakes, e.g. Lev. 7.12f.), of birds, or of flour alone; (2) community dues. It is not necessary here to explain in detail the sacrificial system and the food which it produced. As a rule, individual offerings were eaten by the priests inside the temple itself. In the case of sin and guilt offerings, an animal was brought, and the blood, fat and some of the viscera went to the altar. The priest got the hide and the rest of the meat. If two birds were substituted, the priest got one of them (the other being burnt). If flour was substituted, the priest ate most of it (see Lev. 5.1–13; 7.1–10). All of this food was eaten ‘in a holy place’ (7.6; cf. 6.16 [Heb. 6.9]; 6.26 [Heb. 6.19]), that is, in the temple and in a state of purity. This would mean that the priest must not recently have had contact with menstrual blood or with a corpse, and must not have had an ejaculation after sunset the previous evening.^[4] What ‘purity’ means will be explained more fully below.

The priests also received a portion of peace offerings—‘the breast that is waved’ (the ‘wave offering’) and the right thigh (Lev. 7.28–34). This meat was taken outside the temple and shared by the priest’s family. They had to eat in a pure place (Lev. 10.14) and in a state of purity (Num. 18.11): the women could not be menstruants, no one could have had recent contact with semen or with the dead; the house could not be ‘leprous’, nor could it recently have contained a corpse.

Of the community dues, first fruits were to be eaten in a pure place and in a state of purity, just like the priest’s share of the peace offering (Num. 18.12–13).

The second main component of the temple dues was the tithe. What would later be called ‘first tithe’, ten per cent of produce, was given to the Levites, who in turn tithed to the priests. The Levites could eat their share ‘in any place’ (Num. 18.31), which means that they were not required to eat it in purity. The priests, however, probably were expected to eat their tithe of the tithe in purity, since it is called ‘hallowed’ and is compared to first fruits (Num. 18.26–29). Leviticus 22.1–16 requires that priests must be pure when eating ‘holy things’, which in this passage means any of the priests’ special food, not just what was eaten in the temple. This passage, however, does not say that members of the priests’ families had to be pure when they ate ‘holy things’.

I shall leave aside here ‘heave offering’, which is not a clearly distinct offering in Leviticus and Numbers. Later, we shall see, it became such. The Pharisees thought that it should be handled in purity (see E§2 below), and it is probable that it was generally expected that priests and their families should eat it in purity.^[5]

Thus far we have seen food which the priests could eat in a state of purity within the temple and food which they and their families could eat in purity outside the temple. Priests could not always be pure, and the women of priests’ families would have been impure at least one-fourth of the time (see below, on semen-impurity and menstrual impurity). We do not know what the women did if they were impure when the priest brought home his share of a peace offering, nor what the couple did about intercourse in relation to eating the peace offerings and first fruits. Did they have sex, wash, wait until sunset and only then eat—which is what biblical law strictly requires? The principle is clear, though some of the details of practice are not. Priests were underemployed, and it is possible that they managed to have sexual relations shortly before sunset, which would solve the problem; they could wash, the sun would set, and then they would be pure. It is also possible that they winked at the rules. They may have had access to ordinary food, at least for their wives. Whatever the realities of their domestic lives, as far a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Note from the Publisher
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Transliterations
• Glossary
• The Synoptic Jesus and the Law
• Did the Pharisees Have Oral Law?
• Did the Pharisees Eat Ordinary Food in Purity?
• Purity, Food and Offerings in the Greek-Speaking Diaspora
• Jacob Neusner and the Philosophy of the Mishnah
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects