Dr. Helen Bond

So it's to do with who do you eat with, marriage regulations, washing of hands, tithing, all of these things.

And it does seem that purity is a particular concern for the Pharisees.

And purity was a big deal in first century Judaism anyway.

It's actually important in a lot of ancient religions.

But for Jews, purity is a little bit like holiness.

And holiness is the state in which you need to be to enter into the temple, to come in contact with God.

And one interpretation of the Pharisees that I think is probably quite likely is that they were interested in sort of living out the whole of their lives in a state of purity, not just going to the temple, but, you know, wherever they were, they were sort of ready to meet God.

And it might be that these things connected with purity were particular concerns of theirs.

It's a percentage of your produce.

So, you know, in an agricultural world, people are sort of giving 10% of their, you know, whatever they produce, and then they keep the rest of it.

But it's all to do with sort of, you know, the right way to sit down and eat meals with people, the right way to fulfil your obligations as a first century Jew.

Well, people have thought, because they seem to be particularly linked with purity, I mean, there's been a huge amount of archaeology done in Galilee and Judea as well over the last few decades, and people have found things to do with purity.

So, for example, they've found these ritual baths

called mikvahut.

And the thing with purity is that lots of things can make you impure.

So lots of very normal bodily things.

So for a woman to menstruate or to have a baby, you're impure.

For anybody to touch a corpse or a person with leprosy or a skin disease.

So it's very easy to become impure.

And that doesn't matter most of the time.