The Purity System We Never Understood with Dr. Jonathan Klawans

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have a very special guest with us, Dr. Jonathan Klawans. Thank you so much, Dr. Klawans, for joining us today.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Thank you for having me.

Johnny Ova: All right, let's jump into the conversation. I know we're going to be talking a lot about impurity, impurity laws, sin, things like that. When most people hear impurity, they immediately think sin. But you've argued that ancient Jews saw these as completely different categories. What's the distinction?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Well, not quite completely different categories. But yes, sometimes when we approach this as moderns, we think of impurity as dirt. We think of it as sin. Sometimes we think of it as caste. All of these things get in the way. In the Hebrew Bible, I have argued, impurity language is used primarily in two distinct ways. One is the impurities we often think about with the Hebrew Bible: substances that come from the body, corpses, carrion, different kinds of unclean or impure things. In the Hebrew Bible these produce a period of defilement, which means separation from the sacred, and it's resolved by bathing, in some cases washing hands, washings and other purification rites. These defilements are temporary. Sometimes they last a week, a little more or a little less. The details are in Leviticus and the book of Numbers. But these things aren't sinful. It's not sinful to die. It's not sinful to give birth, which is certainly a source of defilement in Leviticus chapter 12. Sexual activity is defiling, and that too is commanded in Leviticus, within constraints. So these things are natural and unavoidable, and the defilements are temporary.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Then there are other passages in the Hebrew Bible where purity language is used differently, like Leviticus 18 or Leviticus 20, where sin defiles the land, and if it gets really bad, it leads to exile. This isn't simple sin. This is big stuff: sexual transgressions, idolatry, bloodshed, major transgressions, and purity language is used there too. However, there are also differences. These big transgressions are sometimes described as abominations, with the Hebrew word to'evah, whereas the first category, ritual impurity, is not. So there's some overlapping terminology, and there are some ways of separating them out. The mistake many people make is either conflating the two or thinking that some of the language is figurative and some is not. Linguistically, the language functions the same way: things are doing things, things are defiling things. So neither is necessarily metaphorical, but there's a difference. They don't get conflated in the Hebrew Bible. So when people think all defilement is sinful, that's the mistake.

Johnny Ova: It's a great point. One of the main reasons I wanted to get you on is this mindset where, as a Christian, it's taught that impure means sin, evil, wicked. And you mentioned things like menstruation, childbirth and dying. To think you're doing something wrong or impure because you're naturally going through these things, I think there's a lot of damage in that. Along the same lines in the Christian realm, there's teaching like being born into sin, that we're no good, and it takes away the aspect of value. So I think this is going to be an important conversation. As you mentioned, ritual impurity comes from things like childbirth, menstruation and touching a corpse, and these aren't sins. So what was the actual purpose of the purity system if it wasn't about moral failure?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: That's a good question. We don't really know, but we can guess. Part of it comes from reading the various passages of the Bible that describe defilements as things one stays away from. So what's the purpose? One purpose is achieving sanctity. The impurities are natural and unavoidable, yes, but their impact involves separation from the sacred. When one is impure, there may be some separation from the house, or lepers would have to leave the camp, and so on. But for the most part, the real impact would have been that impure people weren't allowed into the tabernacle and then the temple. That's real. Then there's the passage about what happens if I'm impure and can't perform a sacrifice: you have to wait a month. There's a passage about that in the Pentateuch as well. So a concession is made, but the sanctity is maintained. Now, on one hand that impact is negative, but we can turn that negative information around. Put differently, purification, separating from these things, is what allows ancient Israelites to enter the tabernacle and encounter sacred space. It's part of the preparation for encountering holiness.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Then we can try to extrapolate. This is my own theory that I've bandied about. It may or may not be correct, but I think there's insight into ancient Israelite theology here. Why would Israelites want to separate? Yes, sex is commanded and death is inevitable, but why would one want to separate from these things in order to encounter the deity? Well, the God of Israel is single, singular, does not partner. Sex has nothing to do with God. God is immortal and doesn't die. So when human beings temporarily separate themselves, symbolically, though it's not just symbolic, maybe even in a sacramental way, because this is efficacious ritual, they're able to encounter God by imitating him.

Johnny Ova: You pointed out that some of these impurities are unavoidable and sometimes even required. Can you walk us through an example of how the system actually worked? If you're impure, if you touch a corpse, what needs to happen?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: You asked us to consider the corpse, so let's do that. A corpse can defile within a small amount of space, even through the air, so in Numbers 19 one doesn't necessarily have to touch it, though touching it would of course convey the defilement as well. Presumably one might be touching the corpse because one is preparing it for burial, so one continues those activities. With corpse impurity especially, we have to proceed on two levels. First, consider what the person who has done this must do. They finish that activity and then engage in a process of purification, which involves a period of time, bathing, and rituals of purification performed at distinct moments. The precise timeline is in Numbers 19. Numbers 19 is a really interesting text because it also tells the story of a special substance the priests need to produce to effect purification from corpse impurity. That's the mysterious and complicated ritual of the red heifer, which has to be burned not in the temple. The preparation of this substance takes place outside the temple. The red heifer is slaughtered and burned, and the ashes are mixed into a substance that's used as special purification water. That has to have happened already.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: And there's an irony there that goes back to the question we began with. The priests who prepare this substance are defiled by the process. They're commanded to do this. They have to do this. They're priests. There are a couple of other examples, and burial in a way is another. There are instances in the Bible where defilement is not only natural or more or less unavoidable. Sometimes defilement is commanded. It is the byproduct of doing God's work.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I was going to ask: do we even know the whys of the red heifer outside the temple? I'm sure that's up to everybody's guess. Or do we know?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Sometimes the Hebrew Bible tells us what it's thinking. The Sabbath is a memorial of creation. Circumcision is a sign of the covenant. At times the Hebrew Bible uses explicit symbolic language. Some scholars say only in those cases is it symbolic, and everything else isn't. Others, and I fall into this camp, think symbolic thinking is not always articulated, so we try to extrapolate. We have to be careful. This exercise of imagining, like what I did a moment ago in understanding ritual purity as imitatio Dei: can I prove it? No, I can't. Am I certain I'm right? No, I'm not. Do I feel we're better off thinking that ancient Israelites thought symbolically, and that not all symbols are explicitly articulated? Yes, I believe that as a scholar. And I'm intrigued. The Numbers 19 ritual is a paradox, which is just a fancy word for contradiction in some ways. It's fascinating, full of tensions and conflicts. Why is it done outside the temple? Because this ritual produces defilement, you can't have it inside the temple. So some aspects are practical. That doesn't answer why the ritual defiles. One theory, I'm pretty sure it's in Jacob Milgrom's commentary, is that it works almost like a sponge. The material absorbs defilement. That could be, but we don't know.

Johnny Ova: It's amazing how they came to those conclusions. Let's get the red heifer, kill it outside, and it'll be a sponge. Sure. Now, on the other side, the moral impurity connected to idolatry, sexual transgression and bloodshed. We understand a little of what made these different from what you explained before, but what were the consequences? I'm sure it was more than just, go get cleansed.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: The consequences are much more dire. Again, there are passages on this in Leviticus 18 and 20 regarding incest and some of the other transgressions, in Numbers, and some passages concerning idolatry. And this language shows up in some of the prophetic texts, Ezekiel in particular. With moral impurities, these acts that cause defilement defile the land. I think we need to try to imagine this. Think of bloodshed defiling the land. It happens on the ground, the blood goes into the ground, and the blood can cry out from the ground. I think ancient Israelites thought of this as sacred property, sacred land, being desecrated. Sometimes when we substitute that word, desecration, it helps people understand moral defilement a little better. And desecration is cumulative. That's why this is slow. But in Ezekiel's descriptions of this process, the temple and ancient Jewish society are full of these things, from his perspective. When the land saturates and all of this backs up into the temple, almost bubbling over, the divine presence departs, and Ezekiel describes that. Leviticus talks about exile as a result. So the moral defilements, the abominations and sinfulness accumulating in the land, end with the temple being defiled, and God can't remain, so he departs.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: That's described dramatically in Ezekiel chapter 9. Many scholars connect Ezekiel with the priestly tradition. There are all sorts of literary contacts, and I'm arguing conceptual contacts too, between Ezekiel and the priestly tradition.

Johnny Ova: So the consequences of this going unaddressed are, like you said, exile and the departure of God's presence.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Right. And positively, what could prevent it? Atonement. Stop doing it. This is cumulative. Even Jeremiah, operating at the same time, doesn't use all this language, but he has this idea of consequence. Good behavior can outweigh the bad. It's not inevitable yet. Maybe the decree can be averted. Ancient Israelites came to understand that that's how this happened. But of course these texts, Ezekiel and Jeremiah certainly, all believe the exile and the departure of the divine presence are not permanent. They can be undone again by atonement, God giving the people a second chance.

Johnny Ova: Many Christians read the prophets as rejecting the sacrificial system altogether. Passages like "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" get quoted a lot. I know you push back on that reading. What were the prophets saying?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Thank you for asking me that. That's right. And by the way, it's not just Christians. There are all sorts of readings of ancient Judaism that I think are framed by later perspectives. Many Christians come to believe the Old Testament is replaced by the New. That's pretty common. And that Jesus' sacrifice replaces temple sacrifice, with the implication that something must have been wrong with it. Many modern Jews actually believe something similar: that prayer replaces sacrifice, that sacrifice was an inadequate spiritual expression and prayer is a better one. Many Jewish scholars of the Hebrew Bible are shaped by this perspective as well. So it's not a distinctly Christian problem. It's not a problem a Christian reader could solve by picking up a book by a Jewish scholar. It's a little more complex. But you're right, these are things we can all be more sensitive to. It is based in part on readings of the prophets, but on selective readings of the prophets and of all these texts. Even Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew tells the person to reconcile with his brother and then offer his gift. So even with the New Testament text, if we read against the grain, there are reasons to wonder how strong this notion of anti-templism or anti-sacrifice really is.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: But to go back to the prophets. Yes, there are these passages: I want this, but not that. The "not, but" structure is complicated. Take "I come not for the righteous, but for sinners." Does that mean Jesus wants nothing to do with righteous people? That can't be. These are priorities. Often the "not, but" structure is a prioritization, not necessarily a rejection of what precedes it. That's one important thing. And there are all sorts of aspects of prophecy that explain it. Let me point to two passages, speaking positively. Even Hosea: when the prophet lives without having sex with his wife, that's supposed to be analogous to the Israelites living without sacrifice. That tells us that properly performed sacrifice connects with God. So the point is, why are the prophets so upset? I think prophets like Amos, but also Isaiah and others, give us the clue. Amos is so upset with sacrifice because the people are thieves. They have stolen. And this is key. There's that wonderful passage at the end of 2 Samuel where David is atoning and insists on purchasing the plot of land. Araunah wants to give it to him: I'll give you this, you can have it all.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: And David says, no, because I cannot sacrifice to God something that I did not pay for, something I did not acquire. Sacrifice has to be yours. And a prophet like Amos feels they're selling the poor for a pair of sandals and for silver, and lying down beside the altar. All of this involves theft, taking what's not your own. We sometimes think the prophets want you to be in a certain state of mind before sacrifice, or something like that. No. Sacrifice is material, sacrifice is stuff. And the prophets are offended by people offering to God what they can't claim on their own because they're stealing from the poor.

Johnny Ova: You mentioned before, and I want to focus on this now, that sacrifice was not primitive or spiritually empty, but organized around this concept of imitatio Dei, imitating God, which is pretty interesting when you think about it. How specifically does sacrifice imitate God?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: To understand sacrifice, we talked about the biases against it, and we've addressed a couple: the Christian perspective, and the modern Jewish perspective of prayer replacing sacrifice. By looking at the prophets, we've also worked against some of those ideas and seen that sacrifice is really stuff. It's material. All of that helps. Another thing that helps is remembering that sacrifice is a really long process. It can't happen without ritual purification. And to have the material for sacrifice, you need unblemished animals. That means somewhere in the background, priests and others are taking special care to preserve parts of their flock, to protect them from anything that could make them improper for sacrifice. That's caring. God is the shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The careful shepherding is part of all this. It's all preparatory, but it's leading somewhere. Ancient Israelites aren't allowed to sacrifice a mother and its young on the same day. They can't be killed on the same day. You have to remember who's who in your flock. You have to tell them apart. They all look the same to us.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: But you may well have, listening to your podcast, non-urban farmers and others who encounter animals much more directly than most intellectuals do, so this matters too. All of it, the guiding, the preparation, the purification, leads to the moment where these things come together. Then the priest exercises control over the life and death of the animal, and then examines the animal. Those aspects can be understood this way too: controlling life. There are expressions in the Hebrew Bible that get carried into Jewish liturgy, and perhaps Christian liturgy too, you can tell me, about God looking at the inside. The Hebrew expression is bochen kelayot valev, examining the kidneys and the heart. It's usually translated metaphorically as mind and heart. God looking inside. God is the one who knows human secrets. But this expression actually describes the part of the post-slaughter sacrificial process where the priest examines these organs and figures out what goes where. And then of course God is a consuming fire, and the sacrifice is consumed. So the whole process from beginning to end: I really think imitatio Dei is an idea explicitly articulated in many places in the Hebrew Bible, and it therefore applies in all these other ways. I can't prove it, but thank you for letting me share it with you. I'd be curious what you or your listeners think.

Johnny Ova: It was absolutely fascinating, really beautiful stuff. Some of the arguments and positions you've put forward are just awesome. Another one was that sacrifice functioned to attract and maintain God's presence in the temple. Can you walk us through how that worked?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Sure. Now that we've talked about sacrifice and imitatio Dei in a general sense, we want to think about what sacrifices do. There's no doubt Leviticus 16 is there, and many sacrifices perform an atoning, corrective function. But it's important to remember that's only some of the sacrifices, and the Leviticus 16 ritual is done once a year. Many of the other sacrifices happen daily, with extra ones on the Sabbath. I think it's helpful to see them as constructive, not just undoing what sin does, but constructive, attracting the divine presence. The rituals are performed, the sacrifice, especially the daily sacrifice, is burned, and the divine presence comes in. One of the dramatic stories is Exodus chapter 40, where the Israelites build the tabernacle and perform these rituals, and then the divine presence, the fire, the kavod, the glory, appears and occupies it. The sacrifice precedes that. It sets up the sanctity, so it attracts and then maintains the presence. And then of course sin can send it away, and other sacrifices can then say, please come back. But sometimes we start with that end and think of sacrifice as only restorative or reparative, as opposed to constructive.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I see a lot of that bleeding over into Christianity today. You've got my mind going a million miles a second, because I'm thinking, this relates, this is why some people think this. Fascinating stuff. The word supersessionism comes up a lot in your work. Sorry, I have the word right in front of me and it just goes over my head. You argue that later theological frameworks, both Christian and Jewish, have distorted how we read the ancient sources. What are some of the biggest distortions you see?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: First, I want to be clear that my issue isn't criticizing Christianity or criticizing modern Judaism. It's recognizing how whatever perspectives we hold may prevent us from understanding other people. So I want to be clear: I'm not counter-Christian or counter-modern Judaism. All of us, whatever our perspectives are, need to check every once in a while: are we understanding them? And for most of us, ancient Israelites really are a "them." Yes, many Christians find a connection with ancient Israel, and many Jews do too. But sometimes we think we're a little better than them, that we've improved. People who believe in human progress inevitably believe these things. For Christians, it's the supersessionist notion, as in Hebrews, that ancient Israelite sacrifice was just inadequate to the task. A Christian who believes that, but wants to understand Leviticus on its own terms, has to set that aside for a moment and recognize that ancient Israelites didn't believe that. They believed something else. If we want to understand what they believed, we have to set that aside. Similarly, there's almost a modern Jewish supersessionism. It's not entirely modern. It actually begins with Maimonides and a few others in the Middle Ages, who believed prayer is better than sacrifice.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Almost all modern people believe prayer is better than sacrifice, either because it's more communicative or because it doesn't involve killing animals.

Johnny Ova: I was going to say, more practical. I haven't killed a red heifer at the church recently.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Practicality, or aesthetics. Those of us, and I include myself here, who don't perform sacrifice but do eat meat. I'm not a vegetarian. The elimination of sacrifice is really no net gain for the animals. It just changes where they die. If you're eating a pastrami sandwich when you go home, it's not a gain for them. So that's prayer replacing sacrifice, and then there are also modern notions about animals that vary. I said I'm not a vegetarian, and that's true, but I'm fascinated by these issues, and I think all of us do well to think about our relationship with animals. We cannot understand sacrifice without thinking about our relationship with animals, because sacrifice is about people who had domesticated animals and controlled their lives. And by the way, domesticated animals don't die natural deaths. That's not how it works. If you're a shepherd, your sheep are not going to die of old age. They're going to serve certain functions, live out a certain lifespan, and then serve various purposes, food or whatever it is. So there's a kind of Christian supersessionism, a Jewish supersessionism, and then all these modern ideas about human progress and how we relate to animals. We have to undo all of that to appreciate sacrifice.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: One quote I like to share with my students: when we go back into a sacrificial world, we can learn something from the philosopher Sallustius, a profoundly anti-Christian writer, so I don't expect you or anyone in the audience to agree with him. But every once in a while someone can put their finger on something even if you disagree with them. Arguing in defense of the Roman sacrificial system, he said that prayer without sacrifice is just words. That's a helpful reset for thinking about sacrificial societies. We're so removed from them in all these ways. Not everyone. There are cultures where sacrifices are still performed. But most of us, and many listening to your podcast, are probably a little removed. If we really want to understand it, it's different. And understanding doesn't mean we have to go back. It just means we can have a more self-critical, better-informed way of appreciating how things were.

Johnny Ova: All right. 70 AD, the temple falls, destroyed. What happened to a people whose entire system of relating to God was tied to a building that no longer existed?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: That's a tricky question. Far be it from me to downplay the significance of the temple for Second Temple Jews. It was a really important place, and a lot rode on it. I'm not sure everything did. Many Jews lived in the diaspora. They maintained a connection to the temple, but at a remove. Let's also be clear that it's not just the temple that was destroyed. Jews living in the Second Temple period were mourning the temple, and they were also mourning their people who were dying and who had died. That's tragic too. And some of the survivors were enslaved and brought into the diaspora and elsewhere, so the suffering continued. This really was a catastrophe, not just the loss of a building and a place of connection with God. That said, synagogues already existed. Ancient Jews didn't have all their eggs in the single temple basket. Sola templa, that's not right, that wasn't good Latin. But the temple was one pillar. There's a rabbinic passage: Torah, avodah, gemilut chasadim. The world rests on three pillars: Torah, teaching; avodah, sacred service; and acts of loving kindness. Now, with a three-legged stool, you pull one leg and it's going to fall. But on the other hand, two out of three ain't bad, and other forms of service could still continue.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: That's one piece. The other thing to keep in mind about how a society would respond to something like that is that there's a built-in narrative. When we're talking about the destruction of the Second Temple, it's not unprecedented. It is the second temple. The narrative, the idea that the covenant would continue beyond the destruction, the answers were already there. Wow, I guess rebelling against Rome was a mistake. I guess fighting among ourselves was a mistake, the civil war aspect of the rebellion. Many rebellions have civil war as part of what they are. So most of the self-reflection draws on ideas that had already played out. The writers who talk about it, Josephus and later the rabbis, are mostly able to talk about the destruction of the Second Temple using sources from the Hebrew Bible, whether Lamentations or Jeremiah or others. The script to follow was there. So yes, it was a catastrophe, but one for which the internal traditions of the Jewish people had answers.

Johnny Ova: I have two more questions for you before we bounce out today, and I have to hit on this. When we turn to Jesus and the Gospels, how should we understand his interactions with purity and the temple? Was he rejecting the system, or is something else going on?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Boy, that's a big one to toss in at the end. I agree with those scholars who presume Jesus was a Jew and was operating within the system. I do think Jesus was arguing with the system. But take a passage like Mark chapter 7. You have the critique of eating with unwashed hands. You have what is, in my view, the ambiguous saying: it's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, it's what comes out of your mouth. And then you have what, in my view and the view of many scholars, is a later Christian gloss, 7:19b in many versifications: thus he declared all foods clean. I don't think Jesus said that. I don't think Jesus intended that. I think the strongest argument is that the whole passage is about unwashed hands, which is rather abstract. If the Gospel writers really wanted Jesus to say you could eat pork, the story would say that Jesus and his disciples were having a ham sandwich or something like that. It's much more nuanced. I do think Jesus had critiques of his society. The Gospels don't give us what the Pharisees' or Sadducees' answers would have been, and polemics are often distorted. But I think Jesus may well have thought the people of his age didn't have their priorities quite right and wanted to reset those priorities.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: But just as the prophets didn't reject sacrifice, I think there's a lot of evidence, like the passage we mentioned earlier. In Matthew chapter 5, Jesus tells that person, reconcile, then go back to the temple.

Johnny Ova: You hit the second part of the question I was going to ask, so you covered two in one. Lastly, and we know we're coming from an academic standpoint here, if a pastor or church leader has been teaching that Old Testament purity laws were about earning God's favor, or that Jesus came to abolish an oppressive system, what would your advice be? Where could they start reading, studying and learning more?

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: I think there are plenty of good resources. I guess my books might be a place to start.

Johnny Ova: You've got to promote your books, which we'll link in the description, by the way.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Jacob Milgrom wrote a commentary in the Interpretation series. He was a very sensitive Jewish scholar, and that might be a little more directed to some of your audience. I think those are very good places to look. And I'd say, shun the binary. That would often be my advice. One does not need to put down the Pharisees to celebrate the achievements and the perspectives of early Christianity. One doesn't need to do that. So yes, there are things to read about this, but a lot of it is also the question of whether one slips into binary thinking. This isn't just a Christian problem. Anyone can slip into the binary thinking that we have the answer and the rest of them are the bad guys. Shun that thinking. It's always worth asking, what would that person have said? How could I shake that person's hand and recognize them too? Academics can fall into this as well. Arrogance is not just in the realm of religion, and neither is binary thinking. But we can all expand our minds in a spirit of humility, recognizing and trying to find the humanity of the other.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Klawans, thank you so very much for your time today. It was a really fascinating discussion.

Dr. Jonathan Klawans: Thank you for having me. Thank you for reaching out.