UC San Diego

The central argument of my dissertation is based on two bodies of literature. The first area deals with the categorization of biblical impurity and is articulated most effectively by Jonathan Klawans. Klawans demonstrates that there are two ideologies of purity in the Hebrew Bible, ritual and moral. The state of ritual impurity pertains to the human body, is unavoidable, temporary and can be cleansed. Conversely, moral impurity is incurred through behavioral choice. Three grave sins cause moral impurity : murder, violation of sexual prohibitions, and apostasy. No purifying activities can reverse the impurity. Moral impurity, unlike ritual impurity, has severe consequences. Either the land will expel its inhabitants or violators will be subject to krt, being cut off from their people. I have also based my argument on source critical scholarship and linguistic studies that demonstrates that priestly writing predates the writing of the exilic prophet Ezekiel. I show that Ezekiel distorts priestly ideas about women and their blood by intentionally confusing the categories of ritual and moral impurity. Furthermore, in the still later book of Ezra- Nehemiah, the word ndh, a term that previously referred only to menstruation, a cause of ritual impurity, has now come to refer to the general contamination of moral impurity. In Ezra, this transition has occurred, perhaps, unbeknownst to its author. Thus, there is a correlation between the ideologies of impurity in the Bible (ritual and moral) and an increasingly negative portrayal of women and their bodies. For prophetic writers, moral impurity became an effective way to speak about the experience of exile (586/7-530). The deity literally expelled the people for their sins. To the detriment of women, a regularly occurring bodily function, which even the pre-exilic priestly writers viewed as normative, became the symbol of the people's gravest transgressions