No Pure Purity

In their editorial introduction to Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions, Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan question the common distinction between “moral” and “ritual” impurity, and the popular claim that purity rules were evolved in a “spiritualized” direction.

They admit that purity means different things in different contexts, and that the language of purity is applied to moral concerns, but even when purity is used in an ethical sense, it usually retains a religious or “cultic” orientation:

“The separation of two categories is misleading in several ways: The dimensions of physical and moral purity differ (for example on the level of acts) but are not separate concepts, either in synchronic or in diachronic respects. They are close to each other and are often intertwined. There is neither a ‘pure’ moral purity nor a physical impurity without any link to the ethos of a specific society and thus to a certain ethic. Both dimensions interfere with each other and may be separated for heuristic purposes only. Every physical purity or impurity has a moral aspect and all purification has a moral dimension as well” (20).

Accounts of ancient impurity that trace a progress from “archaic” pollution beliefs to a more “rational” metaphorical or spiritualized purity are often linked with a notion of “Hellenization,” the influence of Greek concepts on archaic religions. Frevel and Nihan are appropriately skeptical of the Hellnization thesis too: There needs to be a “revision of the traditional assumption of a complete cultural ‘break’ between the Hellenistic period and earlier periods in the ancient Mediterranean” (40).

Hellenization is inaccurate partly because it minimizes the role of Persian notions of purity that preceded the spread of Greek civilization. On the other hand, the Greeks were operating with purity notions that were consistent with the cultural and religious climate of the rest of the ancient world.

Frevel and Nihan conclude, “this calls for a much more differentiated assessment of the transformation of the dynamics of purity and impurity in the second half of the first millennium than the current view of ‘Hellenization’ implies, and for the development of a theoretical model that takes seriously the complexity of the phenomenon of intensification of economic and cultural exchanges that may be observed in the ancient Mediterranean in the context of the Persian (Achaemenid), Greek and Roman empires” (40-1).