Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 01:1 (NA 1991)
Article: Uncleanness: A Moral Or An Ontological Category In The Early Centuries A.D.?
Author: Jacob Neusner

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BBR 1:1 (1991) p. 63

Uncleanness: A Moral Or An Ontological Category In The Early Centuries A.D.?

Jacob Neusner

The University Of South Florida

and

Bruce D. Chilton

Bard College

I. Systemic Analysis And Category-Formation

Diverse Judaic systems, or Judaisms, interpret each in its own way the received categories of ancient Israelite religion as portrayed in the Old Testament.1 Consequently, interpreting a given system’s documentary representation of a category established in the Israelite writings of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. requires considerable reflection. Opening the Old Testament and out of its resources declaring the meaning of an Old Testament category for a Judaism represented in much later writings is not merely anachronistic. It also distorts the later writers’ systemic reading and adaptation of the received category. For what a systemic construction makes of that category—not only the selection and definition, but the very classification and the importance accorded to one Old Testament category and not to another—finds realization in the systemic construction of all other categories, that is, in the composition, shape, and structure of the system itself. These simple and easily demonstrable principles of analysis that have emerged in the history of ideas, including theological ideas, over the past century or so do not always exercise the influence that they should. Consequently, even today we find harmonization where

BBR 1:1 (1991) p. 64

there should be differentiation, mere paraphrase where analysis ought to take place. Opening the Hebrew Scriptures as an encyclopaedia for first-century Judaism, people misinterpret the complexity of the Judaisms of that time by portraying as a single, unitary, harmonious, and linear development the chaos of Judaic systemic formation, reconstitution, and even dissolution.

These general remarks on the importance of differentiation and analysis, the centrality of context and nuance, will not elicit surprise and ought to be received as truisms. For who, in this day and age, imagines a single, unitary “Judaism” emerging in a linear unfolding straight out of the Old Testament, any more than that a single, unitary “Christianity” is portrayed, as of its point of origin, by the New Testament? These conceptions, legitimate theological necessities, everyone understands, impede the description, analysis, and interpretation of the diverse Judaic and Christian systems that, leaving their detritus of holy books, holy doctrines, and holy rites, define the tasks of theology. A half-century or more of learning separates us from the age in which anyone fa...

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