Issues of Impurity in Early Judaism

by Thomas Kazen

In this volume of collected articles and papers on impurity and purification in early Judaism, Kazen focuses primarily on questions of the impurity of discharges and the practice of hand-washing before meals. Kazen uses both literary and historical methods, as well as approaches based on cognitive science; the analysis covers texts from the Pentateuch, Qumran, the New Testament, and some Jewish Hellenistic authors. Some chapters are based on unpublished papers, and others have been recently published in various journals; two are based on material and arguments similar to a couple of forthcoming articles for volumes that they will not always be easily found by potential readers. Several of the essays relate to or complement each other, thus making this collection very convenient for the reader interested in the topic.

210 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Fred Kohn]

My impetus for reading this book was to get some help understanding the purity regulations in the Mishnah. The book wasn’t much help in this area, so if someone could recommend a better book for this purpose, that would be great. It wasn’t a total loss, though, because I found the articles that intersected with purity issues in the NT to be interesting.