‘We became refuse and rubbish’: Violence,filth,and rehumanization after exile

Abstract

While frameworks of purity and impurity were widespread in ancient West Asia and well known before the exile, many exilic and postexilic sources focalize purity concerns. This article will explore the connection between ancient West Asian texts associating or equating conquered groups with filth and disgust-eliciting substances and the focus on impurity-removal that is so obtrusive in post-exilic biblical sources. I will argue that the rituals of purification detailed in the priestly texts of the Pentateuch constituted practices of rehumanization, seeking to alleviate the deep-seated sense of filth and impurity that a variety of texts from the exilic and post-exilic eras so clearly exhibit. These priestly texts arguably offered to Judeans both purification and a path to healing from the dehumanizing violence suffered by earlier generations, violence leaving after-effects still felt by postexilic communities, as various early postexilic texts demonstrate.

Introduction

In Zech. 3, we encounter Joshua son of Jozadak, high priest at the time of the return of exiled Judeans from Babylon. We might expect this figure to embody the hopes and triumphs of a return so long hoped for. Instead, Joshua displays on his body the residue of decidedly less ebullient emotions. In this vision, the high priest appears wearing garments stained with fecal matter. We read in vv. 1–5:

Then he showed me the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of Yahweh, and the accuser (śātān) was standing at his right hand to accuse him. And Yahweh said to the accuser, ‘Yahweh rebuke you, O accuser! Yahweh who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this man not a brand pulled from the fire?’ Now Joshua was dressed in clothes stained with feces (bĕgādîm ṣô’îm) ¹ as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him, ‘Take off his feces-stained clothes’. And he said to him, ‘See, I have taken your guilt away from you, and I will clothe you in festal attire’. And I said, ‘Let them put a pure turban on his head’. So they put a pure turban on his head and clothed him in the attire. And the angel of Yahweh was standing by. ²

Thus, we see that the guilt of Joshua, which is presumably the guilt of exile and the guilt of the community of exiles, is symbolized by fecal matter that clings even to the fineries of cult. Before that cult could recommence in the Jerusalem temple, Joshua must be divested of his filthy garments and fitted instead with pure clothes.

In this article, I will examine why Zechariah might have been written in this way, featuring this particular image of restoration. Zech. 3 is hardly the only biblical text to connect violence, and particularly the violence of exile, with bodily filth and material impurity. In fact, I will posit here that the abiding interest in impurity on display in priestly texts and other texts dating to the exilic and early postexilic eras ³ is grounded at least in part in experiences with imperial violence—its rhetoric, its realities, and its lingering after-effects. Dehumanization took various forms in antiquity, as is also the case in our era, and I will contend that the overwhelming interest in purity matters so apparent in the postexilic era was a response to a specific form of dehumanization—what I call objectification through association with filth—deployed by Assyrian and Babylonian empires against subject peoples. Exilic and postexilic texts not only appear to confirm what Mesopotamian sources themselves indicate—that associating victims of violence with filth was a part of the ancient West Asian grammar of violence—but also attest to the potency of this association for victims and victimized communities. They also attest to the powerful emotions elicited by the material realities of violence associated with disgust.

This strong connection between violence and filth, imprinted through trauma, engendered a response from subsequent generations who sought to heal from the violence endured by their forebears. In my view, priestly writers, drawing upon older traditions of purity and purification, emphasized purity matters not just out of an interest in restoration of the Jerusalem cult but also in order to remediate the sense of filth that clung to the Judeans. According to my reading, then, the priestly purity texts and rituals found in the Pentateuch served as practices of healing. While these rituals were historically, symbolically, and socially complex in their origins, functions, and instrumentality, not serving merely one purpose or arising from merely one concern, an important dimension of priestly purity traditions in the postexilic era was, I argue here, their connection with the filth of violence, which these traditions played an important role in ameliorating. Judean priests presented to their fellow Judeans ritual strategies by which they could alleviate the dehumanizing violence that had associated them with filth by alleviating the impurities and sense of impurity that postexilic sources tell us still clung to them. The purity texts in Leviticus and Numbers emphasize purity and purification in large part because purification was necessary for rehumanization from this particular form of dehumanizing violence. This article, therefore, proposes a very different understanding of the purity texts found in Leviticus and other priestly texts than what is typical among either biblical scholars or everyday readers of the Bible. Rather than merely offering a list of arcane rules of the cult, these texts present us with practices of cleansing that constituted a form of communal rehumanization.

Dehumanization as objectification through association with filth

How scholars define or apply the concept of dehumanization varies, sometimes quite widely. ⁴ Many scholars speak of different types of dehumanization, and differentiation between different forms of dehumanization is quite important to my treatment here. Dehumanization, in my usage, refers to the attempt to stigmatize or reduce the status of a group or individual members of a group by comparing or equating them with non-human creatures, pathogens, substances, or objects. ⁵ This comparison or equation may be achieved through speech, images, actions, or a combination of all of these. Our understanding need not—and perhaps should not—presume conceptual frameworks that are actualized through behaviors, such that group A holds dehumanizing views about group B and then proceeds to act on them, in a Cartesian, mind-over-body duality. Rather, dehumanization is, I think, best understood utilizing cognitive metaphor theory. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 3) write:

[M]etaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action …We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Dehumanization, then, is a process involving this cognitively-rooted metaphorization and one that encompasses thought and action. However, the metaphorization does not involve the same vehicle in every context. At times, dehumanization involves comparison of a human group to animals—generally to particular species or a particular kind of animal. At other times, it involves equation of a human group with disgust-inducing substances or with inanimate objects. These are just two of several types of dehumanization that one could identify. I refer to the type of dehumanization that equates a human group with objects, substances, or other inanimate things as objectification. While the term objectification is often used broadly by feminist scholars to refer to the sexual subordination of women, my usage here is a bit more narrow. ⁶ For the purposes of this research, I use objectification to refer to more clear-cut equations, comparisons, or associations between victims and inanimate objects or substances. Examples of the objectification type would be the equation of target groups with feces, vomit, or other body fluids seen as repulsive, with garbage, or with lifeless objects such as tools. In fact, one could further differentiate the objectification type of dehumanization into at least two subtypes, with one being an association or equation of target groups with disgust-inducing substances and the other being an equation of groups with objects that convey instrumentality, use value, and human beings as mere means to an end. In this article, I will concern myself with the disgust subtype and how it relates to biblical purity texts. More specifically, I will examine how Leviticus and other purity-focused materials dating to exile and the period following respond to this form of dehumanization. Sources from ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Israel and Judah that connect victimization with physical filth, vomit, feces and a sense of disgust will form the backdrop for my argumentation.

Dominant approaches to understanding Judean priests and their literature

The priestly texts of the Hebrew Bible—more specifically P and H, but also the book of Ezekiel—were the product of a group of people who had witnessed and experienced extreme violence of many kinds or who were the descendants of parents or grandparents who had experienced that violence. Yet, biblical scholarship on priestly Pentateuchal materials has not accounted for this fact in the same way that scholarship on Ezekiel has. While scholarship on Ezekiel has been quite attentive in recent years to the traumatized violence of that text and/or the trauma of its author(s), ⁷ most biblical scholarship on P and H has focused instead on questions of source criticism, redaction, and dating. Certainly, the past twenty-five years have seen a rise in the number of works on Pentateuchal priestly writings concerning themselves more broadly with the thematic contents of these books, in particular the purity and sacrificial regulations and practices that they describe. For example, Saul Olyan (2000), William Gilders (2004), and Nicole Ruane (2013) have emphasized the hierarchical aspects of this material and the ways in which Judean priests crafted writings that amplified their own power and social status. Thomas Kazen (2010, 2021), moving in a different direction, has drawn upon cognitive science approaches to disgust and other emotions to propose understandings of biblical purity texts that move beyond the arguably reductionist frameworks of such earlier scholars as Jacob Milgrom and Mary Douglas. ⁸

As strong as these works are, this article will take a different approach by foregrounding issues of violence, trauma, and healing. In doing this, the article here will build upon the approaches of these scholars. For example, like Kazen, my understanding of purity and impurity bears the influence of New Materialism. ⁹ New Materialist approaches to disgust and purity meld evolutionist, cognitive science, and culturalist methods, taking seriously the material, physical nature of bodies and the bodily needs of human beings while at the same time attending to the very real ways in which power relations, cultures, and social systems shape human psyches and people’s experiences of their bodies. The treatment of priestly texts found here is informed by New Materialism in important ways, but it is also informed by trauma studies and discussions of recovery, healing, and wellness occurring in different fields, ones wedded to psychomedical frameworks of recovery as well as ones diverging sharply from such confines to understand healing as a cultural and communal phenomenon. ¹⁰

With these approaches forming the scaffolding for this treatment, we may come to see the purity literature and priestly literature of the Pentateuch in a more expansive fashion. While Israelite and Judean priests were concerned with social hierarchies of different kinds and solidified their own status through their writings on purity and sacrifice, as Olyan, Gilders, and others have argued, I would contend that it is perhaps reductive to see Judean priests as focused exclusively on power and hierarchy. On this score, I agree with Roy Gane (2024: 58), who in a volume engaging the work of Catherine Bell—a theorist incredibly interested in the role of rituals and ritualization in creating and reinforcing power relations—states:

Israelite rituals did construct power relationships within the social organization. However, Bell’s idea that this strategy is the ‘first and foremost’ aspect of ritualization (Bell 1992: 197) does not appear to characterize adequately the Israelite ritual system as a whole, at least not in the way that pentateuchal texts present it. The system primarily benefitted YHWH’s people in a variety of ways by giving them access to mediated interaction with the transcendent covenant deity. ¹¹

The priestly texts of the Pentateuch are, after all, very complex. The priests responsible for P and H were human beings negotiating tumultuous social settings and periods of rapid political, social, and cultural change. It is only reasonable to assume that the texts they produced would reflect the intricacies of their social realities. P and H texts, as I understand them, rather than being simply about power, instead served different social, cultural, and psychological purposes all at once. One important and hitherto neglected aspect of these texts is how they respond to and offer a powerful means of alleviating the cultural and psychological effects of dehumanizing violence.

Evidence for the weaponization of disgust by imperial powers

If we read priestly texts with an eye toward complexity and multiplicity, a different set of features comes to the forefront. More specifically, the rehumanizing agenda and potential of these texts becomes more clear. A New Materialist approach helps us see the rehumanizing aspect of these texts, as we begin with these questions: How is the innate human capacity for disgust developed, molded, and weaponized in different cultural contexts and especially in contexts of violence? How do groups experience and respond to this weaponization? The association of victims with filth, dirt, or garbage is a rather common form of dehumanization cross-culturally. ¹² Do we find evidence for this objectification type of dehumanization in ancient West Asia, and specifically in sources relevant to the experiences of Israelites and Judeans? If so, how did these groups respond to being dehumanized in this particular way?

In fact, we do see the disgust-association type of dehumanization in sources from ancient West Asia. Many of these sources date to the first millennium BCE. I will begin with evidence from the Mesopotamian empires. Body fluids feature quite prominently in Assyrian royal inscriptions, with blood unsurprisingly being most prominent of all. We read in the Annals of Sennacherib, for example:

The wheels of my war chariot, [which lays] criminals and villains low, were bathed in blood and gore. I filled the plain with the corpses of their warriors like [grass]. I cut off (their) lips and (thus) destroyed their pride. I cut off their hands like the stems of cucumbers in season. ¹³

Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions are rife with statements of this kind, with kings reveling in the prodigious scale of their bloodletting. Of course, while Sennacherib and other kings might revel in this violence, one can imagine how for survivors the sight of rivers of blood dyeing the mountains red might provoke disgust. So, too, the experience of being covered in blood, which one might not soon have the opportunity to wash off and thus might become caked on one’s clothing and skin, with its mineral smell becoming more and more fetid.

Yet blood is certainly not the only body fluid that appears in Assyrian sources on violence. Various texts state that victims were so consumed with panic that even experienced warriors urinated, defecated, or vomited at what they saw. The annals of Sennacherib state repeatedly of enemy soldiers: ‘Their hearts pounded like those of hunted baby pigeons, they urinated on themselves, (and) they defecated inside their chariots’. ¹⁴ We also find other phrasings, such as: ‘Terror of doing serious battle with me overwhelmed the king of the land of Elam and the king of Babylon and they defecated inside their chariots … Their hearts were pounding and (v 1) they were vomiting’. ¹⁵ Ashurbanipal states that one group of fugitives grew so desperate that they resorted to cutting open their camels to drink their blood and excrement to quench their thirst. ¹⁶ Thus, we see in various Assyrian texts a focus on fluids and how these are connected with extreme violence, dread, and, one imagines, disgust.

Babylonian sources from the first millennium BCE are admittedly less forthcoming on these matters. Babylonian royal inscriptions are both less plentiful than Assyrian ones and less graphic in their descriptions of imperial violence. Still, we do have evidence for the scale of Babylonian aggression and the conceptions associated with it in the form of Babylonian mythological traditions, Israelite descriptions of Babylonian violence, and archaeological evidence of the destruction wrought by Babylonian armies. ¹⁷ These together seem to indicate that the Babylonians did not differ from the Assyrians in their willingness to subject transgressive subject peoples to extreme violence. Babylonian literary sources offer evidence not only for violence but also for Babylonian conceptions of the blood and filth associated with it. Extreme violence often figures prominently in mythological texts dating to earlier eras. The Babylonian Epic of Creation, also called Enūma Eliš, predates Babylonian imperialism against Judah but remained popular in the first millennium BCE, when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and exacted violence of different kinds against its populace. ¹⁸ The Epic of Creation describes how the god Marduk created the world through the slaying and dismemberment of the goddess Tiamat. Just after he pierces her body with an arrow and lets loose her entrails, we read: ‘The Lord [Bēl] trampled the lower part of Tiamat,/With his unsparing mace smashed her skull,/Severed the arteries of her blood,/And made the North Wind carry it off as good news’. ¹⁹ He then fashions the architecture of the cosmos from Tiamat’s corpse. Prodigious bloodletting is presented here as joyful for the one shedding the blood of another. Bloodletting also plays a role, and sometimes a prominent one, in various other mythological texts, such as in the Atraḫasīs, Anzû, and Labbu myths. ²⁰ In the Labbu myth, for instance, the blood of the slain Labbu flows for ‘three years, three months, a day and a [night]’. ²¹

Babylonian texts do at times show an awareness of the horrifying aspects of copious bloodshed, as in the text Erra and Ishum. ²² Notably, the most influential of all Mesopotamian texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh, demonstrates a recognition of the traumatic aspects of violence and loss, even as it also glorifies violence. Interestingly, this text offers evidence at various points that Mesopotamians understood physical grime as something unpleasant that needed to be removed or washed away. At the beginning of tablet VI, right after Enkidu and Gilgamesh have slain the monster Humbaba, we read that Gilgamesh ‘washed his filthy hair, he cleaned his gear,/ Shook out his locks over his back,/Threw away his dirty clothes and put on fresh ones’ (lines 1–3). ²³ Later on, after the violent death of his companion Enkidu, Gilgamesh wanders around the steppe, devastated. When he reaches the wise one Ut-napishtim in tablet XI, he needs a good bath: ‘The man whom you led: filthy hair fetters his body…Bring him to a wash-bowl,/And let him wash in water his filthy hair, as clean as possible (?)./ … Let his body be soaked (until it is) fresh./Put a new headband on his head./Have him wear a robe as a proud garment/ … The garment shall not discolour, but stay absolutely new’. ²⁴ We see in Babylonian sources, then, that violence is bloody and filthy, and filth is something that we want and need to wash off ourselves.

In light of the totality of this evidence, we can conclude that both of the imperial powers that ravaged Israel and Judah in the first millennium BCE utilized dehumanizing, traumatizing violence. Evidence for dehumanizing violence relating to different kinds of body fluids and the emotions they elicited, especially disgust, is not scarce. Disgust elements appear to be present in both Assyrian and Babylonian sources from different eras, and so it seems plausible that the Babylonians could have weaponized or emphasized disgust in some fashion in their execution of imperial violence.

Biblical evidence for the weaponization of disgust against Judeans

The texts written by their victims, the Judeans, seem to readily support this understanding. Disgust figures rather prominently in Judean texts describing the imperial violence and forced migrations to Babylon of the 6^th century BCE. I will provide just a few examples here of the many that one could marshal. In Lam. 1.8–9, for instance, we read: ‘Jerusalem surely sinned, so she has become a menstrual impurity (nîdâ)./All who honoured her now despise her, for they have seen her nakedness./She herself groans and turns away./Her impurity was in her skirts. She considered not her own future./Her downfall was incredible, with no one to comfort her’. In 1.11, the narrator beseeches: ‘Look, O Yahweh, and see how worthless I have become!’ Lam. 2.11 speaks of tears and retching: ‘My eyes are worn out from weeping, my stomach churns./My bile is poured out on the ground over the breaking of the daughter of my people’. Lam. 3.45 states: ‘You have made us refuse and rubbish among the peoples’. And 4.14–15 reads: ‘They wandered like blind men through the streets, so defiled with blood/that no one was able to touch their clothes./‘Get away! You are impure!’ People shouted at them, ‘Get away, away! Don’t touch (us)!’/So they ran and they roamed’. ²⁵

The language of disgust is also present in texts from Jeremiah and Ezekiel that speak of exile and imperial violence. Jeremiah repeatedly uses the language of being ‘shocked’ or ‘appalled’, of ‘abomination’, and of disgust, as in Jer. 2.7, 12; 4.1; 6.8, 15; and 7.30. Ezek. 16 and 23 are of course famous for their images of exile, which combine rage, self-hatred, and disgust with graphic violence and sexuality. The book of Ezekiel emphasizes the impurity and grotesqueness of blood, menstrual blood, semen, and feces. ²⁶ The impurity and disgust surrounding bodies and body fluids are not incidental to this book; rather, they take center stage and hew closely to Ezekiel’s priestly concerns and worldview.

These intersections are also pivotal in the priestly texts found in the Torah. The Holiness Collection in Leviticus in fact characterizes exile as an act of vomiting. On four occasions in Lev. 18 and 20, the language of vomit is used, with the Israelites being warned not to engage in prohibited behaviors, because by doing so previous inhabitants of the land had defiled themselves and the land had then ‘vomited’ them out. ²⁷ One example of this is Lev. 18.25: ‘Thus the land became impure. I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants’. If the Israelites should transgress, the land would do the same to them. The authors of these texts set them in the time of Moses, a time predating their own Persian-era context by many centuries, in order to lend authority to them. But what the Holiness Collection is doing is characterizing the forced migration of the Judeans in the 6^th century BCE as an act of regurgitation and bodily expulsion by the land itself. The people do not just elicit nausea through their behavior; they themselves are vomited out of their own land into the land of their conquerors. They become the vomit of exile.

Disgust, and disgust centered specifically on bodily experiences and body fluids—the fluids of death, the fluids of rape, the fluids of impurity—figures prominently in the imaginations, memories, and psyches of biblical authors. Impurity and disgust are best understood in these texts as both culturally differentiated and as intersecting phenomena. That is, they overlap with each other but are not exactly the same concepts. Still, both concepts loom large in biblical texts dating to the exile and the period following it.

Responses to the disgust of dehumanization

The connections between violence, disgust, and impurity are evocatively made in various exilic and postexilic texts. Thus, it is not surprising that Judean exiles and their descendants would seek ways of processing and overcoming the disgust and impurity that they saw as connected with violence and trauma. Having been, in their minds, reduced to garbage and filth, the refuse of the streets, it is understandable that the Judeans would devote cultural attention to recovery from this aspect of their trauma. In ancient West Asia violence was so often ritualized, dehumanization was ritualized, would we not expect rehumanization, too, to be ritualized? This is precisely what I am arguing here: The Judeans developed frameworks and sets of practices that responded to particular forms of dehumanizing violence that they had experienced. While we cannot say one way or the other whether the Judean priests instrumental in this were consciously responding to experiences of violence, it does seem clear that their practices did address situations, emotions, and memories that the passages on disgust I outlined associate with sadness, horror, nausea, shame, and contempt aimed toward victims of violence.

In biblical materials dating to the period just following the exile, we see efforts to remediate the disgust and impurity associated with violence. Zech. 3 is a parade example of this. The guilt of the exiles clings to Joshua in the form of physical filth. The historical trauma of the Judeans has effects that linger for generations—as research on much more recent cases of violence has demonstrated is also common in modern contexts. ²⁸ Before the cult could recommence in the Jerusalem temple, the nauseating fragments of violence attached to Joshua needed to be purged.

Ezek. 36, a somewhat earlier text, evinces this as well. Ezek. 36.16–38 describes the filth and transgression of the exiles as being like the filth of menstrual blood. The book of Ezekiel is notorious for its gendered and even violently misogynistic understanding of both impurity and imperial conquest. ²⁹ This culpability-of-the-exiles-as-menstrual-filth, like the filth of exile in Zechariah, must be purged through a ritual action. Yahweh himself cleanses them: ‘I will sprinkle pure water upon you, and you will be purified from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will purify you. A new heart I will give to you, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove from your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh’ (36.25–26). Human hearts will beat once again, dispersing blood and a newfound sense of remorse through the bodies of dispersed Judeans, but only after the filth of violence has been washed away from them.

Priestly purity texts as a program of rehumanization

While various texts dating to the exilic and Persian eras discuss purification, and specifically purification from bodily filth and fluids, the biblical book most focused on purity and impurity is certainly Leviticus. The defilement of body fluids figures extremely prominently in Leviticus. Numbers also contains priestly material legislating purification practices. ³⁰ Between these two books, we find passages prescribing purification rituals for the impurity caused by corpses, semen, menstrual fluids, childbirth and the fluids of childbirth, venereal disease fluids, and skin disease, among other forms of impurity. Priestly texts present purification of the body as necessary for the maintenance of the sanctity of worship spaces. Yahweh was not a god who abided impurity, which profaned the holiness of his cult. Lev. 15.31 exemplifies this well: ‘Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their impurity, so that they do not die in their impurity by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst’. In fact, Ezek. 8–11 reveal just how catastrophic defiling the cult could be, as it led Yahweh to abandon his temple and give his people over to horrific destruction. In the Holiness Collection, as we saw, concerns over impurity are in some ways even broader—impurity defiles the land, which vomits out transgressors.

Postexilic priestly sources do not invent the idea that body fluids could be contaminating to sacred things and places—this idea finds expression in earlier Israelite sources (such as 2 Sam. 3.29 and 11.4–11), as well as in Mesopotamian ones. ³¹ Where postexilic texts differ is in the depth and length of focus on these issues. If one compares Israelite legal collections to the extensive corpora of Mesopotamian legal materials, the biblical focus on impurity certainly stands out. Mesopotamian legal collections, when they speak of the cult, are much more interested in regulating the property transfers and marital behaviors of cultic functionaries than they are in delineating purification procedures. Presumably, these collections take cultic purity and purification as a given. But purity—or to speak more precisely, the ability to become purified—was certainly not a given for the authors of Ezekiel or Lamentations, sources that reflect an intensely emotional response to the disgust and impurity of exile and imperial violence. Nor was purification taken as a given by the postexilic community attempting to revive the cult. Even decades after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, the intersection of disgust and impurity emerges in the image of the filth-stained priest in Zech. 3. It also emerges in the description of exile as a vomiting out in Lev. 18 and 20.

Yet, the priestly sources of the Pentateuch add to the focus something quite significant by offering to the postexilic community a detailed program of purification. Leviticus, unlike many prophetic books, is not primarily focused on threatening the Judeans but rather on detailing for them how they must purify themselves. While in Ezek. 36, Yahweh himself might sprinkle the exiles with water, there is no strategy offered to the exiles for how they might act to become pure again, besides being horrified by their own filthy bodies and behavior. Similarly, Lamentations beseeches Yahweh to take action. Zechariah, too, imagines purification as coming from the divine realm. But the priestly sources in Leviticus and Numbers offer a strategy of human action to resolve human impurities, as well as clear instructions on how to avoid impurities of various sorts and how to alleviate unavoidable impurities through ritual means. If imperial violence had weaponized the sense of disgust, leaving victims with a perduring sense of their own filthiness and impurity, P in a way neutralizes that weapon, offering a path to purification and perhaps even a path to healing.

A few examples of how P does this should prove illuminating. Lev. 15 details the purification procedures required after various genital discharges, including ones resulting from sexual behavior. Like the other chapters in Lev. 11–15 that prescribe purification rituals, the tone in Lev. 15 is matter-of-fact, lacking the sense of disgust and vitriol that one finds in such books as Lamentations and Ezekiel. Lev. 15.16–18, for example, state: ‘If a man has an ejaculation of semen [literally, ‘seed’], he will bathe his whole body in water, and be impure until the evening. Everything made of cloth or of skin on which the semen falls will be washed with water, and will be impure until the evening. Whatever woman a man has sex with [has an ejaculation of semen with], both of them shall bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening’. The language is almost clinical, the purification procedure, uncomplicated and quotidian. In cases that P considers to entail more severe impurity—such as childbirth or venereal disease—purification is more elaborate, but still, the tone is surprisingly unemotional. The passages instruct rather than emote.

Num. 19, which outlines the procedures necessary for purification following contact with a corpse, is also for the most part direct and unemotional. It applies broadly to contact with any corpse, no matter how the individual may have died: ‘Whoever in the open field touches one who has been killed by a sword, or who has died (naturally), or a human bone, or a grave, will be impure for seven days’ (v.16). The procedure outlined is rather elaborate—involving the ashes of a ‘red heifer’ and two stages of purification. Num. 19 does present corpse impurity as a serious matter. Purification is hardly optional: ‘Whoever touches a corpse, the body of a human being who has died, and does not purify themselves, defiles the tabernacle of Yahweh. That individual shall be cut off from Israel. Since waters for impurity were not dashed on them, they remain impure. Their impurity is still on them’ (v.13). Maintaining the purity and sanctity of the Yahwistic cult is of utmost importance, and those refusing to take the steps necessary to safeguard it are threatened with severe punishment. Still, what is blameworthy is the refusal to follow purification procedures. There is no presumption of guilt for those who have died and become corpses, nor for those who have encountered dead bodies in whatever location. Community members are not prohibited from coming into contact with dead bodies—doing so was necessary for mourning and burial—but they are enjoined to take the steps needed to alleviate the impurities that dead bodies cause.

Even Lev. 16, which outlines the requirements for Yom Kippur, is surprisingly lacking in emotionality. The text details how the priest Aaron will make atonement not just for himself and his own household but also for the whole people of Israel through presenting various sacrificial offerings and enacting a scapegoat ritual:

He will slaughter the goat of the sin-offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the curtain, and do with its blood just as he did with the blood of the bull … Thus he shall make atonement for the sanctuary, because of the impurities of the people of Israel, and because of their transgressions, all their sins; and so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their impurities … When he has finished atoning for the holy place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he will bring forward the live goat. Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the wrongs of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness. (Lev 16.15–21)

And so the priestly passages present instructions for purification of various types but also outline a day on which rituals for a broader, more generalized purification would take place.

The relevant chapters in Leviticus and Numbers take a broader view than many readers give them credit for. They are clinical in tone when they address impurity. Impurity is divorced from the emotionality of disgust—for the most part. In chapter 17, Leviticus transitions from P material to the Holiness Collection. In the latter, emotionality comes back to the fore. This collection, as we already saw, uses the imagery of vomiting and is well known for casting particular moral transgressions as ‘abominations’ (tô‘ēbôt). The writers of H could not free themselves entirely from the emotionality of their people’s violent history. That violence left intangible aftereffects that were both emotional and religiocultic in nature. However, unlike Lamentations, Ezekiel, or Zechariah, Leviticus and Numbers do not simply lament impurity, or condemn the defiled, or imagine that it was only Yahweh who could purify them. Instead, the Judean priests living in the Persian era took an important step forward: They drew upon the purity rituals that had been a longstanding part of their culture, highlighting and expanding on them. They did this, as other scholars have argued, in order to reinforce and elevate their own status as purveyors of purification. Yet they did more than this. Their revival of the cult together with its resurrection of cultic purity played a central role in the reconstitution of the Judean community in the Persian era. Priestly purity rules served as practices through which the Judeans could address and alleviate their lingering sense of impurity. Generations after the brutality of Babylon left their forebears bloodied wanderers, the Judeans could at long last wash away their filth.

What P and H leave unaddressed

It seems necessary to anticipate two questions or possible objections that might be raised to this understanding of postexilic priestly sources. The first regards the fact that the priestly sources in Leviticus and Numbers do not construct feces or vomit as defiling, which is interesting. In this, they deviate from various other biblical sources, including Zechariah, Ezekiel, Deuteronomy, and 2 Kings, which do regard such matter as impure. ³² We can only speculate on why Leviticus and Numbers do not. ³³ It may relate to the greater difficulty of controlling the emission of feces and vomit—for example, a priest could become ill and inadvertently vomit or soil himself in the temple precinct and thus endanger the temple’s sanctity. The postexilic priestly writers may have been concerned that if feces or vomit were classified as impure, this could increase the threat to the maintenance of purity. Perhaps they were concerned enough about this that they attempted to shift what seems to have been a longstanding view in Israelite culture that feces at least was defiling. This shift would have either purposefully or inadvertently spared Judeans subjected to certain forms of filth association from having to worry about the cultic implications of that filth association. Even if one were filthy in this way, one’s relationship with the divine would not be affected, according to P. And when it came to the impurity of other bodily fluids, with which P is certainly concerned, this source offers a clear means of purification.

A second interesting question that could be raised would be this: If the cultural and psychological effects of imperial violence form the backdrop for P/H’s focus on purity, why do Leviticus and Numbers not discuss this violence more directly? For one thing, the choice of the priestly authors to set the book in the time of Moses, in what even for them was the very distant past, made directly addressing Babylonian violence impossible. While Ezekiel and Lamentations could directly refer to their contemporary context of violence, only indirect references fit within the Pentateuchal framework. Another issue is that returnees were not themselves the victims of imperial violence; rather they were the descendants of those victims. Despite the seeming lack of direct experience with violence, the sense of impurity apparently remained in the descendants of those exiled—as we see in Zechariah and Leviticus. Perhaps this was because these descendants had a limited ability to purify themselves in exile or because their parents and grandparents were left with such an abiding sense of their own impurity and filth that they inculcated this in their descendants.

We see in cases of extreme violence from our own world evidence that trauma can affect families and communities for three or more generations. There is research demonstrating this in relation to, for example, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, as well as descendants of Indigenous people who were forced to attend residential schools in the U.S. and Canada. ³⁴ Recent research demonstrates that victims of violence frequently experience a strong desire to bathe, both to wash the fluids of violence off of themselves and also to try to wash the experience of violence off of themselves in order to feel clean again. ³⁵ Postexilic purity rituals would seem to provide a framework in which this could be done both for individuals and for the community as a whole. A woman who was raped would wash herself and remain ritually impure for one day only, just as she would after any sexual intercourse. A Judean who encountered dead bodies in a wartime context would follow the ritual procedures outlined (Num. 19) for alleviating corpse impurity of any sort, and then be clean. If one became covered in feces or vomit, this was not a problem—according to Leviticus those fluids do not lead to ritual impurity, and thus would not endanger one’s relationship with the deity. Further, the Holiness Collection in Lev. 17–26 outlines which behaviors are out of bounds and lead to what some scholars call ‘moral impurity’; if those behaviors were avoided, then the Judeans would never again be vomited out of their land. If they did sin, this is what the day of atonement was for. Despite Jonathan Klawans’s (2000) assertion that ‘moral impurity’ could not be cleansed, Christophe Nihan (2013: 348–49), and Yohan Yoo and James Watts (2021: 53) have convincingly argued that the Yom Kippur rituals outlined in Lev. 16 were actually meant to alleviate deviations and impurities of various kinds, including moral ones. ³⁶

From the Priestly Source (P) and the Holiness Collection of the Pentateuch, Judeans could learn which behaviors to avoid, which fluids rendered one impure and which did not, as well as how to alleviate any resultant impurity. These sources are both backward- and forward-looking in that they show an awareness of the catastrophes of the past and provide guidelines for how to avoid such catastrophes in the future. They also present instructions for alleviating impurity in the present that involve bathing, washing clothes, and the sacrifice of animals.

Conclusion

We see, then, in biblical sources of the exilic and postexilic periods evidence of a group of people struggling with effects of violence that had lingered months, decades, or even generations. Of course, evidence from more recent episodes of extreme violence has shown that this is hardly atypical. I have focused here on the type of dehumanization that is centered on bodily disgust, describing how this form of violence is attested in biblical and extrabiblical sources and how biblical writers attempted to alleviate its effects in ritualized ways. Of course, rituals of purity and impurity were not new to this culture. They are attested in various earlier biblical texts. ³⁷ Judean priests did not invent these practices after the exile. But they did group them together in a generally organized and sustained fashion during a period in which various biblical authors seem quite concerned with matters of purity and particularly with the impurity of fluids and the impurity of violence. The fact that these practices were already known likely would have made the marshalling of them in a time of widespread concern over the bodily experiences of violence all the more powerful and efficacious. The utilization of recognizable frameworks in the attempts of priestly writers to reconstitute and repair their community may have been one of the primary reasons why the Torah’s purity laws apparently became so widely accepted in periods following the exile. While the acts of bathing and changing into clean clothes may seem to us small things, exilic and postexilic texts reinforce what we see, too, in contemporary accounts of trauma—that washing away the filth of violence is indeed no small thing. In Lamentations, Jerusalem is reduced to the filth that clings to her. In Leviticus, Jerusalem’s children wash that filth away.

P and H, but especially P, presented a thoroughgoing and actionable response to one form of dehumanization—objectification through association with filth. If texts from Ezekiel, Lamentations, Zechariah, and Leviticus are any indication, this type of dehumanization had left a very real imprint on the psyches of Judean victims and their descendants. Pentateuchal materials either reflect a communal response and move toward rehumanization and healing or created such a response, or both. This priestly program of rehumanization had an impact—both in its own time and afterwards. The Jerusalem cult was reestablished, and that cult involved purification procedures for the entirety of its existence. Outside the temple, there is evidence for ritual bathing during the second temple period and afterward. ³⁸ Many Jews today continue to follow some of the ritual purity laws in Leviticus, having been forced to abandon others when the Romans destroyed the second temple. The Jerusalem priests, through their ritualized response to dehumanizing violence, clearly shaped Judean society and culture in significant ways. Deutero-Isaiah presents Cyrus as the face of return and restoration (Isa. 44–45), but the priests who wrote Leviticus looked not to foreign kings to find their models of return and recovery. Instead, they looked backward, before the time of Joshua son of Jozadak with his filthy garments, before the exile that had shamed and defiled them, before the time the Jerusalem temple had even been built to the earliest era of their people’s history—the time of Moses and Aaron. The faces of priests and prophets past became the faces of restoration and purification in their own time. The priestly texts found in Leviticus and Numbers serve, then, as a powerful case study for understanding rehumanization, not only in antiquity but in our own contemporary moment, when healing from extreme violence is sadly as needed as ever.