Within an all-Jewish or mostly-Jewish society, circumcision could be assumed, and the manner of its keeping was (more or less) uncontroversial: a male was either circumcised or he was not.84 But, even within such societies, the keeping of sabbath was a matter of dispute: what counted and what did not?85 The maintaining of purity was even more uncertain: what rendered one unclean and what did not?86 Debates about sabbath and purity, therefore, occupied an immense amount of time and effort in the discussions of the learned, as we know from the Mishnah and Talmud.
