Ceremonial purity functions almost as a displacement activity when faced with the apparent impossibility of national purity. Just as, for the Maccabaean martyrs, refusing to eat pork and refusing to obey the pagan ruler were one and the same thing, so the concern for purity functioned as a means of symbolically enacting that resistance to pagan rule which was nursed secretly and maintained in readiness for revolutionary opportunities, whenever they might be afforded.
