Dr. Helen Bond

It's only if you're interested in going to the temple that you have to be pure.

But in order to become pure, what you do is you go into one of these ritual baths.

They're sort of fairly small, like little cisterns.

You go down one side, you come up the other, and you wait a certain amount of time and you're pure.

So these have been found all over Galilee and Judea, along with stone vessels.

Again, this is to do with purity because pottery can become impure.

So if a menstruating woman touches a pot, it becomes impure and has to be smashed.

But stone vessels don't.

So if you get cups and bowls made out of stone, they can be reused.

And the stones of the limestone around Judea is actually very thin and able, you know, you're able to make it into quite nice pots and things like that.

So archaeologists have found these things to do with purity and they've suggested maybe these are linked to Pharisees.

Are these Pharisaic homes?

Are they people who are influenced by the Pharisees?

The problem is that there's just so much of it.

Josephus says that there were 6,000 Pharisees, which actually is a tiny percentage.

I mean, we don't know whether he's anywhere near, you know, ancient numbers are just kind of plucked from anywhere.

But it does suggest that he thinks that they're not massive in terms of numbers.

So maybe those reflect some kind of Pharisaic influence, or I think possibly more likely, it's just that a lot of people were interested in purity.

One thing that may well be linked to the Pharisees is these little things, little boxes called tefillin or phylacteries.

Now, these are little boxes that have little bits of the scriptures in them.