Purify This! With Logan Williams

Logan Williams So I find two examples where there's something going on which there isn't a name for, but I give it a label, and I call it the nominative absolute circumstantial participle.

Dan Beecher All right, fine. Fine. If we're going to go there, let's go there. Yeah.

Dan McClellan No, you need to do what the 19th century Germans did and just name it after yourself. The Logan rule.

Logan Williams Logan construction. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not that vain.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan. And I'm Dan Beecher. And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat that ever-present misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are great. I'm looking forward to our guest today. I'm thinking about very little else. We are- ... interestingly, we're recording this right after a certain election happened, and I am trying not to think too much about that. So let's dive in and introduce our guest. All right.

Dan McClellan Today, welcome Logan Williams to the show. Logan is the Kirby Laing Research Fellow in New Testament up in lovely Aberdeen, in Scotland. Thank you so much for joining us today, Logan. Great to be here.

Logan Williams Thanks for having me. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, we appreciate it very much. And, you recently published an article that we're here primarily to talk about. Hopefully, we get to talk about some other stuff, get into it a little bit- Mm-hmm ... regarding some Christological controversy.

Logan Williams Oh, yeah.

Dan McClellan But you published, in a journal called "New Testament Studies," an open access article, "The Stomach Purifies All Foods: Jesus' Anatomical Argument in Mark 7:18-19," which is addressing something that I actually talked about a little bit in a video a while ago. I was just sharing my understanding of the received wisdom, and I can't remember if you responded on Twitter or Facebook or something like that, or if somebody else- Yeah, I remember that ... was like, "Hey, man, get calm." Yeah.

Logan Williams It was someone like, "What do you think about at Logan's argument?" Yeah. And I was like, "That's not really fair because it's not out." And I remember replying, "No shade on Dan, he's stating the consensus, and I have this really idiosyncratic view," which some people have argued something similar before. Yeah. But I was like, "Yeah, just wait till it comes out. Stop being a reply guy to anything." I get this all the time, some random pastor will be like, "Jesus freed us from the food laws," and they'll be like, "But Logan!" And I'm like, "What?" Yeah.

Dan McClellan Don't bring me into this.

Logan Williams Before the article came out, I'm like, "That's not helpful. What is that supposed to do for people?" I did have a video of an old presentation I did on it. The argument has developed quite a bit since then, but there was some rumble before it was out, which I felt was just not helpful because I was like- Yeah I think one of the interesting things- "What are people going to do?"

Dan Beecher As we get into this, one of the interesting things of this will be that this is something for non-scholars like myself. This is one of those moments where you get a window into what the world of biblical scholarship looks like. Because I'm not used to that world. Until I started doing this podcast, I was not used to the world of biblical scholarship. Your article hinges on four Greek words, essentially. And the minutia that you people get into- Yeah. Seriously ... is pretty amazing. But those four Greek words, depending on how you interpret it, and you bring in a bunch of different stuff. You're not just talking about four words, but it changes everything. So can we just start by talking about-- You discussed what the consensus view has been. We're in Mark 7.

Dan McClellan We're talking- If it's okay, I want to back up a little bit and just- Oh, okay ... and just orient the listener because right now they're like, "What the hell are they talking about?" Right. And we're talking about purity laws, legislation, purity ideas within first-century CE Judaism- Right ... which is the world into which the New Testament is being written. And going back to my little fumble on social media, as soon as people started mentioning this, I was like, "Oh, no, Matt Thiessen's going to jump down my throat as well." Because I should have recalled, he wrote this wonderful book a couple of years ago called "Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospel's Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism" which is pointing in the same direction that you're pointing, Logan, where it's engaging with this received tradition about Jesus overturning Jewish ideas about purity and basically saying they're all invalid. And Matt here is basically making the case that, no, these laws are still valid. Jesus is presenting himself as the purifier, the solution to the problem of ritual impurity without just saying it's all invalid. And can you describe where we're coming from in this article? What is the conventional wisdom that you're engaging in this article? Yeah.

Logan Williams So for about maybe 150 years or so- Not too long ... Well, let me back up a little bit. Previously, the Textus Receptus ... or the received text. The Greek text on which the KJV is based had one different vowel in the first word of that final phrase in Mark 7:19. So Mark 7:18-19, translated in the NRSV, I'm going to butcher it, but from memory it's something like, "Do you not understand that whatever goes into a person is not able to defile them because it enters not into their heart but into the stomach and is cast out and goes out into the latrine?" And then there's a parenthetical statement in most English translations, most modern English translations that say, "Thus he declared all foods clean," or, "Thus he purified all foods." Or there's some more dynamic translations that say something like, "Thus he permitted all foods as permitted to eat," or something like that, right? Right. The key point is that they take that final phrase to be something that Jesus does. Right. So it's Jesus that's doing the purifying.

Dan Beecher And the thing that he's doing is roughly, or the thing that they're saying he's doing is roughly that he is saying we don't have to worry about kosher laws anymore. Exactly.

Logan Williams Or sometimes that's also coupled with the notion that he's also saying we don't have to care about any purity laws whatsoever. Right. Or some scholars will say Jesus' statement says that there's no such thing as impurity in the material sense. Now, eventually we should talk about the distinction between kosher laws and purity laws. Yeah. How they may overlap and how they won't, but I'll back up through the kind of history.

Dan Beecher I've got notes here about kashrut versus tohura, or whatever. Tohura, yeah. Ritual impurity versus impure animals, and I'm just- Exactly. Look, I took notes. I really worked to follow this thing because I do not have the background to really understand a lot of this. So it took me.

Logan Williams Yeah, I will say it's kind of a baptism by fire article because in order to even begin the conversation, I had to lay all this groundwork about Jewish law. Right. Yeah. And I had to assume that most scholars weren't that familiar with these categories, or necessarily familiar with these categories. Some of them are who work on it, but it's kind of a niche, weird thing. So I had to do a good one-third of the paper is kind of just like, "Let's just set the ground rules here," kind of thing.

Dan Beecher Well, hey, you know what?

Dan McClellan And you're quoting an awful lot of German too, for the lay reader there. Yes. Yeah. Some German.

Dan Beecher There's German, there's Greek. I am wading through the thicket in this thing. It's pretty amazing. But I'm very glad that you did have to lay down those ground rules because whatever background the scholars don't have, I definitely don't have. So yeah. Yeah. I was very grateful for all of that. So sorry, go on with what you were saying.

Logan Williams Yeah, so back in the day, KJV time, the Textus Receptus had in the word kathrizone, which is the word usually translated, "Thus he declared all clean," or something like that. So we'll get into that a bit later. But it's the word for purify or to declare pure, declare clean. Kathrizone in Greek. But that word is a participle, and the Textus Receptus had a neuter participle where our modern Greek Bibles, not modern Greek, but our updated Greek Bibles have an omega. And the difference with that is that if you have an omicron, which makes it a neuter participle, then it means that the subject of the sentence, or the, sorry, the subject of that participle can't be a person. Right. But now that our updated Greek Bibles have a masculine, people for that reason, or for some reasons that we get into in a bit, people think that the subject has to be Jesus. So if you have the neuter participle, what it looks like is that that phrase is a kind of big appositional phrase to the previous clause, "Cast out into the latrine." And there is some evidence in Greek that kathrizone can mean purge. Like think of you have toothpaste and you squeeze it, the toothpaste comes out, and that purges the food or purges the toothpaste from the tube. Hmm. And people, when they were reading the neuter, they thought, "Okay, this probably means purge." So what Jesus is saying is that it goes in and it goes out into the latrine, and when it goes out into the latrine, the person is purging the meats or the foods from their body. Hmm. So that's how it usually was taken. Now, there is some exceptions to this in, for example, Origen, who reads the masculine participle. But once you get the textual tradition that has the neuter, everyone thinks this is a part of Jesus' speech. Pretty much everyone thinks that it means purge. Some people think it means purify, like make clean. But they're definitely in the minority. Hmm. Then Westcott and Hort come along, and they do all of their reconstruction of the New Testament. So around, what is it, Dan? Around the 1850s maybe?

Dan McClellan Yeah, around there.

Logan Williams Like the mid-19th century, I think. Yeah. Westcott and Hort is-- So basically, a bunch of scholars are coming together and realizing that the textual tradition in the Byzantine tradition or the Textus Receptus is probably not the most reliable Greek text. That it doesn't as faithfully represent the original as a number of other manuscripts that were found around then, including, for example, Sinaiticus and other manuscripts. And so after Westcott and Hort, our Greek Bibles change pretty much. I haven't actually traced exactly when this happens. But sometime around the mid-19th century, our Greek Bibles changed so that that word, which was katharizon becomes katharizon. Now this presents a huge issue. The neuter reading is pretty grammatically easy to explain. Yeah. We have copious examples of a neuter participle being used in apposition to an entire clause. So the whole, "It's cast out into the latrine, and this is purging all meats," is a totally normal construction. What's not normal, or what's really weird about the masculine reading, is that usually a participle, the subject of a participle latches onto something else in the previous clauses or previous clause. And if it's functioning adverbially, which everyone would agree it's functioning adverbially here, then it has to be that if, or in most cases, if it's adverbial, the subject of the participle matches the subject of the verb that it's modifying. Now here's what's weird. The subject of the previous two verbs, it goes in, or rather that whole sequence of speech about whatever goes into a person is not able to defile them, but blah blah blah blah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Logan Williams The subject of all those verbs is a neuter noun. That which is going in from outside is a neuter. So the whole going in, coming out, has a neuter subject. So if the participle is masculine, then what's the subject of that participle? It can't be the subject of the proximate verbs because that's neuter. So what people posited is, okay, well, way, way back at the beginning of verse 18, you have lege, he said, and the subject of that is Jesus, which is a masculine singular noun.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Logan Williams So people have pretty much since the beginning of Westcott and Hort's Greek Bible, they thought, okay, well, it probably is the case that katharizone jumps over all of these verbs and modifies lege, which means that the subject of katharizone has to be Jesus.

Dan Beecher Got it.

Logan Williams Now, there are some exceptions to this, namely some of the German scholars who argue that it's modifying the previous word, latrine, and they say that the latrine purifies all foods or purges all meats or something like that, however they take it. But that definitely hasn't been the majority in English translations or in Anglophone scholarship. So that is why if you look at translations before the mid-19th century, they will all say, pretty much all say, purging all meats. But afterwards, all of our English Bibles say something like, "Thus, he declared all foods clean." And it has to do with literally the change from a short O to a long O. Wow. Which would have sounded identical in the mid-Roman period. So.

Dan McClellan And that also changes it from reported speech to part of the narration as well. That's an unnecessary change, so it's this- Exactly ... parenthetical. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Beecher The difference then becomes, is this something... I'm just going to recap, just for anyone who didn't follow that completely. Yeah.

Logan Williams We just had like a crash course Greek lesson on participles, so. Right. Yes. Right at the opening of the podcast, so I hope people are still with us.

Dan Beecher I'm going to guess that a few of our listeners don't even know what a participle is. I'm not saying I don't know what a participle is. Of course, I do.

Logan Williams You definitely do.

Dan Beecher But some of our listeners might not have that knowledge, and that's fine.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But what we're saying is, I'm going to read the entire verse 18 and 19, just again. You already said it, but so we're saying- Yeah ... because it's basically one sentence. He said to them, he being Jesus, said to them, "Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile since it enters not the heart, but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?" And then, at least in the NRSV, there's a parenthesis, and it says, "Thus, he declared all foods clean." And that is the more recent version of this, whereas before, it wasn't a parenthetical phrase, "Thus, he declared all foods clean," but rather it goes into the sewer and therefore, somehow that purifies it. Yeah. Is that the difference that we're saying? Yep. That- Yeah.

Logan Williams So the latter or the newer version takes it as a comment by Mark. Right. Right? An explanation of what Jesus did when he said- Right ... at the beginning of 18.

Dan McClellan So the- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Now- So it takes it from a continuation of his sentence to this is what that sentence did. Exactly. Yeah. Correct. Okay. All right. Now talk to us about your theory, which differs from the idea of turning it into this parenthetical.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we're going to have to get into the weeds about like- Get into the weeds ...

Dan Beecher purity and we sort of teased the idea of ritual impurity versus the purity of eating specific animals. Yeah. Which would be the sort of the Torah kosher laws. Yeah. So talk a little bit about that. Talk a little bit about like- Yeah.

Logan Williams So I'll start with the grammatical point, and then we can move to the broader- Okay ... point about categorization of- Yes ... purity laws. So the difficulty is, so I agree, I agree that the correct reading is masculine. Okay. The masculine participle. So I think Westcott and Hort were right to change the textus receptus- ... or propose a better reading than the Textus Receptus. They didn't change the Textus Receptus, right? Right. So, I agree with them. Okay. Now the question then is, no matter what way you cut it, this is just a ridiculously weird participle. You have to do something odd with it because it can't modify any of the proximate verbs. So one option is to do what the modern translators have done in English and say, okay, this jumps over all of the verbs, right? Right. Going in, not able to defile, going into the stomach, not into the heart, into the latrine. All of those verbs in Greek, there's many of them. I think there's like 35 or 36 words intervening.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Logan Williams He said and that, and multiple, multiple verbs, and then all of a sudden that final phrase just skips over all that and modifies the beginning verb in 18. Right. Now, to my knowledge, there's nothing like this in Greek. The corpus of Greek literature we have is massive, so I'm not claiming to have looked at every single participle in the world, which would take me a lifetime, right? Because be sitting on "Thesaurus Linguae Graecae" for years doing that. You're right. And neither has anyone ever proposed, to my knowledge, an example where someone says, "He said," and then it reports direct speech, right? Not, "He said that," but, "He said." Quote. Right. And then a long quotation, and then a random dangling participle that modifies the verb all the way before all those other intervening things. Right. I've never seen anyone propose an example of anything like that. The other issue is, and this is something Kevin Grasso brought up to me, is what nouns and subjects, and entities are in view when you're reading this, right? There's all sorts of things that go in, latrine, person, heart, stomach, right? All of these nouns are kind of in view, but Jesus, right, is not in the proximate frame of this- Right ... of this discourse finding in the verse. So how likely is it that someone would just automatically, just like speed reading this, native speaker in Greek just blowing through this, would automatically pick up that katharizō is picking up the subject Jesus? What you would expect is, as it's rendered in English, a finite verb, houtōs, houtōs de legē, or sorry, houtōs de katharizē ho Iēsous panta ta vromata, right? You would expect a full clause. Yeah. And this is one of the red flags that we have going on here, is that English has to introduce a new subject, thus He, and a finite verb where there isn't a finite verb, He declared clean, but we don't have either of those in Greek. We don't have a full sentence. So this is kind of raising the orange or red flags that this translation can be questioned. So what I did in my article is I found two examples from the Septuagint of what I think is a very, very rare construction, that nonetheless exists in Greek, but might be a product of translation Greek. So I'm not entirely sure if there's examples of this in non-translation Greek, but as we all know, Septuagintal language that might have not been natural or kind of standard in the ancient world seeps into the speech patterns of Jewish Greek speakers- Yeah ... because they're raised on this text, right? It's similar to the way we speak in KJV phrases all the time, and we don't realize it, right? We have so many things in our vocabulary that were introduced into the English language, or popularized by the KJV, and we have no idea, and that might have been weird in the original context. So it's similar. The Septuagint invites a lot of speech patterns, or helps Jews, or incites Jews to develop certain speaking patterns that might not have otherwise been popular. Sure. So I find two examples, where there's something going on, which there isn't a name for, but I give it a label, and I call it the nominative, absolute, circumstantial participle.

Dan Beecher All right, fine. Fine. If we're going to go there, let's go there. Yeah.

Dan McClellan No, you need to do what the 19th century Germans did and just name it after yourself, the Logan rule.

Logan Williams The Logan construction. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not that vain. And what I think is happening here is that basically, I'm not going to get into these weeds because we're already deep enough. Yeah. But basically, it's an example of a dangling participle at the end of a series of phrases, where the participle is not picking up on the subject of the previous verbs, but the implied agent depicted by the verbs. Okay. So this is usually God. So it will say something, I think one of the examples I give is from the Psalms, like, "From the works of your hands, the earth will be fed, thus you causing green grass to grow," or I forget the exact example, but it's, right, "The earth will be fed," and then there's a masculine participle at the end that's not a complete sentence that just says, "Causing grass to grow." And so what that's doing is the participle is picking up on the agent of who's feeding the earth, which is implied to be God. So I give a little table for those who are interested. I'm not going to get too more into these weeds, but I give a table comparing these two other examples, to show that actually the construction is intelligible if we compare it to these constructions, if we consider it to be a nominative, absolute, circumstantial, or adverbial participle. And thus what the result of that is, is that we would have to posit that the subject of katharizō is not Iēsous. But anthropos, that is the person that's being talked about in these verses, right? So there's nothing from outside going into a person that is able- Oh, right. A person. Yeah ... to defile them because it goes not into his heart. These are all nouns in the masculine singular that are referring to an anthropos, a human being.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Logan Williams His heart, but it's cast out into the latrine, thus the person, that person who ingested the food, purifying all foods. Okay. And importantly, and again, Kevin Grasso pointed this out to me, the language nerd, there's an article on foods there, so it implies i.e., that particular food that's been ingested by the person- Yeah ... is purified.

Dan McClellan So not all foods that exist, but all the food- Exactly ... that he ingested. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Becomes pure in the process of digestion. And just for those who are interested, table one here refers to Isaiah 28, verses 5 and 6 in the Septuagint, and then LXX Psalm 103, verses 13 and 14, where you have the list and then the implied subject of the participle, if you want to go look those up. Okay.

Dan Beecher So, now that we have-- If we are to take your theory on, now- And we have any listeners that remain. Yeah. If anybody's still with us whatsoever. I'm having fun with this. This is good. But I'm going to do another recap and try not to be too wordy about it. But now we've implied a person, a new subject that is implicit rather than explicit. That human is not spoken, but is implied. And so you're saying the participle refers to this implied noun.

Logan Williams Well, so no matter which way you cut it, the participle has an implied subject because it's not stated, right? Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't say "Iesou legei." But it is explicit in the sense that there are three nouns directly preceding in the previous clauses that refer- Right ... to the anthropos. So you have the anthropos and then two instances of the masculine singular pronoun, so three instances of masculine nouns that are referring to the person. And so I just think, we have to choose. No matter what, this participle is doing something weird, right? So that either we say that the proximate subject that it's pulling from is the implied Jesus from "He said" in the beginning of 18, or, and this is the contribution of my article, we can say that it's also possible that it picks up on a more proximate masculine singular noun, which is anthropos. And I just think the way that people would be processing information when they read that verse, they would immediately think that the subject is the anthropos because it's the more proximate masculine noun, and not jump all the way back to Jesus, who isn't even stated, right? It just says legei. It doesn't say Iesous legei. It doesn't say, "Jesus said." It just says, "Said." Yeah. So yeah. So either way, it's implied, but I think this is the more explicit and more proximate noun that it could be picking up on.

Dan McClellan So we've gone- We don't have Jesus until-- It's not even anywhere in the chapter. You've got to go back to chapter 6. Oh, really? Yeah. At least in the translations, I'm looking. I'm not seeing Iesous anywhere in chapter 7. All right. Well, sorry, I interrupted. Yeah. Continue. No, that's a point. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Beecher So let me just see if I've tracked this. We've gone from KJV basically implying that what had happened was that the food entering the stomach and going into the sewer, somehow made the food clean, or made the food pure or something.

Logan Williams Or it just expels it from the body. So I think- Or just expels it from the body ... they think katharizo means purge Oh, okay. Purge. Yeah. Okay. Purge. Yes. Okay.

Dan Beecher So there's that. Then we have this understanding that it's Jesus declaring all the food's clean, and now your proposal is that it is actually the ingestion of the food that has somehow made it clean. The person makes it clean by ingesting it. Yeah. Is that right?

Dan McClellan Digesting it. Digesting and expelling. Yeah, sorry. Digesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Dan Beecher That's interesting. So talk a little bit now, finally, about- We're talking about cleanliness, we're talking about purity, we're talking about these laws. Because the interpretation of, thus he declared all foods clean, suddenly is Jesus saying the laws from the Torah about clean foods and unclean foods don't apply anymore. Yeah. And you're saying that may not be the case.

Logan Williams I'm probably saying it's definitely not the case. Okay.

Dan Beecher But I'm going to understate that. I'm going to go on record as saying I love that you just probably definitely-ed us. Yeah.

Logan Williams Well, just in the sense that I think the language of my article is quite- Firm ... I don't pull punches in it. Right. Okay. And maybe this is a fault of my rhetoric, but I feel like it's a bit punchy. I'm just like- Maybe this is just like- I say go for it ... a fault in my personality that I'm like, "No, it's definitely this."

Dan Beecher I like it.

Dan McClellan And, hey, just so you know, having been on the other end of some of your published punches- ... it's okay.

Logan Williams Well, you of all people should definitely be able to handle that, right? Yeah. Because you can dish it out, for sure.

Dan McClellan No, I didn't find anything you've said to be harsh. Yeah. You can be curt, but fair. Yeah. Yeah. And, okay.

Dan Beecher So talk about that. Yeah.

Logan Williams So the first thing we have to do is think about how we categorize and understand certain laws in the Torah. And also, one of the important things, actually probably the most important thing is that, and this is just going to maybe sound weird to a lot of your hearers, and also maybe not if you've watched Dan's channel enough, but you can't understand what Second Temple Judaism was like by just reading the Torah. You can't just figure out what Jews were doing just by reading the Torah. Yeah. Now why is that the case? Yeah. The reason that's the case is because the Torah's a really difficult text to interpret and to figure out how to apply. And Jews in the Second Temple period interpreted a lot of these laws in ways that we would think are really counterintuitive and really difficult to justify. So that we can think of maybe two- Can you give an example of that? Well, actually, there are really relevant examples I'm about to tell in relation to- Okay, great. Great. Yeah. Sorry.

Dan Beecher Sorry to interrupt.

Logan Williams We'll get into the weird ones right now. Yeah. Good. So we can maybe talk about two broad categories of things, right? One is certain laws that kind of all Jews generally agreed about how to obey them. And they did obey them, right? So I generally ascribe to what E.P. Sanders calls common Judaism in the late Second Temple period, right? But after the Hasmoneans, after the Maccabees, as Jonathan Adler has really helpfully shown, Jews started obeying the Torah, like writ large, right? Judeans, Yedeoy Jews, became a Torah-observant culture through the Hasmonean dynasty and their implementation of the Torah as the civil law of the land. And so this is why I talk about late Second Temple Judaism, because there's very minimal evidence that in the early Second Temple era, Jews were actually obeying the laws that we now find in the Pentateuch. So we can talk about things that generally were agreed upon, and then a lot of things that people disagreed on. Obviously, there's a lot of overlap between these things, but the reason why you have all these different sects in Second Temple period, the Sadducees, and the Pharisees, and the Zealots, and the Essenes, and the early Christ groups, is because there are lots of different ways of thinking about and construing this material from the Torah. So obviously, the Sadducees and the Pharisees are the classic example of people who disagreed about what it meant to obey God's law. But there are some things that there was a consensus about, and things that might seem really weird. So, for example, and this is really key to the article, in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14:1 through 21, 23, around there, you have a list of a bunch of animals that you're not permitted to eat, or at least, sorry, Israelites are not permitted to eat, right? So it says, X is unclean, this is unclean, whatever. This, you're not allowed to eat, whatever. And it uses the language of impurity to describe these animals that are prohibited. So if you just go read Leviticus 11, it'll say, "These are unclean to you, X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G," whatever, a bunch of stuff. And then at the end it says, previously it uses the language of impurity, and then it uses the verbal forms at the end. So you get . So that's, do not abominate your souls with anything that creeps on the earth, or sorry, with anything that creeps or any creeper that creeps. Do not defile yourselves with them and so become defiled by them. Hmm. That's Leviticus 11:43. And then in 44, it picks up the defilement language again, and it says , "Do not defile your souls with any creeper that roams on the earth." Now, what this would make people think is, oh, this is just the same as a bunch of the other stuff that's impure in Leviticus. Like menstruating women and men that have had any kind of seminal emission, and women who have just given birth to a child, and people with what is often translated as leprosy, which is a bad translation. We'll just call it lepra. People with lepra and houses with weird spots, right? Now, what's really weird is that those laws appear right next to each other in Leviticus. So Leviticus 11 is all about prohibited unclean animals. Leviticus 12 through 15, and you can include 16 if you include the Day of Atonement, is all about these various things that make you impure and how you have to wash yourself and how you have to go through rituals to purify yourself and whatever.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Logan Williams Now what will probably seem wildly counterintuitive is that Jews in the late Second Temple period, so it seems, or many of them at least, just completely siphoned off chapter 11 from 12 through 15. Hmm. Okay. So we'll talk about what that means in a second, but let's talk about 12 through 15. In Leviticus 12 through 15, you get a bunch of things that make you impure, and what these texts do is they prescribe ways of ameliorating that impurity. So to be pure literally just means not to have any impurity. That's all it means. And to be impure is to have this Perceived contagion, this kind of bio-theological thing that can get on you from certain sources, or from certain activities, or from certain things that come out of your body. And then the Torah prescribes ways to get rid of that from your body. So you can go through... Okay. Usually it's just, you kind of immerse, you wait until evening, and then you're pure. Other times, you have to wait a long time, immerse, give a sacrifice. Right. To become pure from leprous impurity, from leprosy impurity, is a multi-step process. The craziest one is in Numbers 19, where you have to go through what's called the red heifer ritual, where you have to do this, a lot of different, really interesting things to purify yourself if you touch or become impure by a dead body.

Dan McClellan A dead body, yeah. Hmm.

Logan Williams So that kind of impurity that's transferable, and that's ameliorated by certain activities, by certain ritual activities, people or scholars have called that ritual impurity. Okay. Now, I think, I'm pretty sure Jonathan Clowans invents this phrase. The category itself, or the intuition that this is a specific kind of impurity goes back through ancient Judaism. Sometimes it was called Levitical impurity in certain Anglophone scholarship earlier. Now it's just referred to as ritual impurity. And so this is the ritual impurity that you can transfer, that you can get, and that you can ameliorate, and that you can pass in and out of.

Dan Beecher So it's sort of a becoming unclean and then a cleansing thing. Is that correct? Yeah. Is that...? Yeah. Okay.

Logan Williams And there's nothing, in principle, acquiring impurity is not immoral. Okay. Now, not doing something to ameliorate your impurity can be really bad in certain circumstances. And if you're a certain kind of person, you're not permitted to acquire certain kinds of impurities. So, for example, the high priest is not allowed to ever contract corpse impurity. Right.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I did notice, as I read through some of these, sorry, I did notice that, yeah, it doesn't say you can never do this. It just says when you do it- Exactly ... when you touch this animal or when you eat this animal, then you have to do X, Y, and Z. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like it's this big problem. It doesn't seem like it's this moral issue. Totally. It's just, when it happens, here, wash your hands, wash your clothes, and then by evening, you're done. You're good. Totally. Usually. Yeah.

Logan Williams And every time a couple has sex, they're impure. Right. So, having a child makes them impure. You're required in Deuteronomy 21, I think, to bury a dead body if you see it on the street. That would make you impure. Right. So actually, there are times where in order to obey the law, you have to become impure. Yeah. So there's definitely, in principle, acquiring ritual impurity is not an immoral thing. Okay. Interesting. In principle, right. There are certain circumstances where it is- Right ... but in principle, it is not. Okay, so now let's go back to Leviticus 11. Tell me, guys, you guys probably know this because you've read my paper, or actually for our listeners, for those who have read something in the Torah, can you tell me what the procedure is to ameliorate the impurity you get from eating an animal that's prohibited? Just give people a second to think. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I feel like I'm in school, and you've just called on me for something, and And I've given you a trick question. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And this is one of the things that you talked a little bit about the pluriformity of the different approaches to the Torah. One of the first things- Yeah ... that they notice when it's like, "Okay, here's the Torah. This is now in charge." They're going to be like, "Uh, moment. I don't know if you noticed this, but one, we got a bunch of contradictions. Two, there are a lot of gaps." Yeah. And so this is what a lot of the Halakhic literature is trying to do, is- Yeah ... imposing things, is trying to harmonize things. But that stuff's not written down for a while, and there were certainly competing traditions. Absolutely. And so you have, and I think of the "Seinfeld" episode where, uh-oh, suddenly, "There's lobster in this?" And now, we've been tricked. There's got to be some way of doing this. Certainly, at some point, they were like, "Hey, what if we accidentally..." Because they asked a lot of weird questions of the Torah in that early literature, so. Yeah, and that's the- So the notion they didn't have an answer is nonsense. So.

Logan Williams Yeah, and because there's a question of whether this literature originated as actual ideal literature or whether it was actually implemented, right? But when you put it all together and then you get the people to obey it, you realize it's really not self-explanatory. Yeah. Right? And this is why you have so many volumes of Jewish laws is in part, in terms of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmud, right, all those other things, is because it's really difficult to know what to do in a lot of situations, and lots of different schools and people had different opinions about rulings about, well, to obey this law in this circumstance, what does it mean, right? The classic one is the Torah does not tell you how to deal with this, right? Let's say you think that circumcising a boy constitutes work, and every Jew seemed to think that it did. Okay. You're commanded not to work on the seventh day. Right. And you're commanded to circumcise your sons on the eighth day. So what if the eighth day of your child's life falls on a Sabbath? Right. What do you do?

Dan McClellan And you got to hire our guys. Yeah. Yeah.

Logan Williams You have to systematize, and you have to be able to find a way to rate commandments. And pretty much every Jew agreed that circumcision overrides Shabbat. Okay. Always. But this is the kind of questions that they had to deal with, right? Once you actually start obeying it practically, you're like, "Oh, wait. That's not clear. Let's have a discussion and figure this out and figure out how to do it," right? So this is part and parcel of just what it meant to interpret and apply the law in the late Second Temple period. Okay, so back to the question, right? All of you have had a lot of time to look at this, for our listeners. What is the purification procedure if you ingest a prohibited animal? And the answer is, there isn't one. Right. In Leviticus 11, there isn't one. It just says, "Don't defile yourselves. Don't abominate your souls. Don't defile yourselves by them and so become impure." And then the next question is, okay, well, if I do that, do I immerse myself? Do I have to go leave a sacrifice to purify myself? Do I give some kind of purification, purgation offering? What do I do, Torah? And the Torah just goes, "Hey, if any woman gives birth to a child," right? Then she's- Yeah. It moves on. It just moves on, right? Yeah. And so the way that Jews understood this was, okay, it must mean that actually, when you eat a prohibited animal, it doesn't transmit ritual impurity to you. Because if it did, the Torah would tell you how to ameliorate that. But it doesn't. So we're exegeting the blank in the narrative, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. The omission is significant, right?

Logan Williams So the way that it's kind of just universally interpreted was the impurity language just means this is not cool. Don't do this. Right? That's it. It's not because they transmit ritual impurity to you, because that also wouldn't be prohibited anyways, right? In principle. It's just because the impurity language is a way of saying, "Don't do this." Okay. Now, was that in line with the original intent of Leviticus? Whatever that might mean, right? Right. Definitely not. There's no clear-cut distinction between Leviticus 11 and 12 through 15 in terms of how they understand impurity, but this is just how Jews understood it. And the clear evidence for this is if you go to the Mishnah and you open up Seder Tohorot. Seder Tohorot is the order, major section, major division of the Mishnah that's dedicated to all things ritual impurity. It is very dense, and it's the longest tractate of the Mishnah. I wish I had my Mishnah behind me, but I'm not in my office because we had that whole experience where my internet didn't work. But you can just look at the size of each of the tractates if they're contained in one volume, and Seder Tohorot just boom. You can just pick it out. Sticks out like a sore thumb. Nothing in that entire order concerns the prohibited animals, or the animals that are considered not okay to eat in Leviticus 11. Huh. There's not even a rabbi that's like, "Hey, does Leviticus 11 come up here?" And then the sages say, "No, you're wrong," right? No dispute arises. There's no like, "Oh, I might think that Leviticus 11 is relevant here as well." What we see a lot in the Mishnah, right? "Oh, I might think this, I might think that." Nothing. Absolutely nothing in any of that whole order about prohibited animals. Okay. So that means this is recording disputes that go back to the 1st century. If there's not a dispute over that, it's probably a pretty widespread opinion. Now, someone might object to that and say, "Ah, well, the rabbinic tradition is a specific kind of sub-tradition of Judaism, and you can't project that onto all of Judaism." And I go, "Okay, but can you show me a text from the Second Temple period that says, 'I accidentally ate a prohibited animal and then I immersed?'" It's not there. And so we just have to assume that even though it's super counterintuitive, the impurity of prohibited animals is not included under the category of, or as we would analyze it, ritual impurity. So eating a prohibited animal is prohibited because God says so. That's it. Right. Not because it transmits anything to you. Okay.

Dan Beecher So what does that mean?

Logan Williams That's the kind of pillar, right? Okay. Right. So that's a really important pillar that probably will be difficult for a lot of people to stomach, but trust me, bro. You can read more in the article for it, but if you want to dig in more. Okay, so then we have to ask, in Mark 7, there's all this impurity defilement language, right? And there's other kinds of categories of impurity that appear throughout Second Temple Jewish literature. We have impurity of demons, impurity of idols, right? Impurity of sexual activities, certain illicit sexual activities, whatever. The first thing we have to do is, what kind of impurity are we talking about in Mark 7, right? And the answer is really, really obvious, right? The passage opens with Jesus and his disciples and a bunch of Pharisees eating a meal together. And the Pharisees see that the disciples are not washing their hands, and therefore they have defiled hands. Okay. Well, we'll talk about hand washing in a bit. But the point being, what kind of impurity are we talking about here, right? Presumably, if they washed their hands, the Pharisees would think it would purify their hands. So we're talking about impurity that can be contracted and then ameliorated. Right. So we have to be talking about ritual impurity, right? And then Mark adds this comment. He says, "All the Ioudaioi," whatever, I'm not sure what it means there, because obviously it's not true that all Jews wash their hands because Jesus' disciples are Jews and they weren't doing it.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. I don't know.

Logan Williams So he says, "All the Ioudaioi wash their hands before they eat, they immerse when they come back from the market, and they have lots of other rules concerning cups and potentially beds." There's a textual variant there. They have a lot of rules about the immersion of cups and whatever. Well, this can only be one thing. This can only be ritual impurity. So I just want to clarify something. Parts of the end of Leviticus 11 have to do with ritual impurity, but they're not listing off prohibited animals. Right. But the first two, three quarters of it is all about what is prohibited and permitted. So that's what I mean when I say Leviticus 11. It's the prohibited animal part. So anyways, back on Mark 7. The context, we're talking about ritual impurity. We're talking about the ability for impurity to come onto hands and then be contracted onto food, and then people to ingest it, and the Pharisees are like, "Well, if you washed your hands, that would avoid that." We're talking about transferable impurity here. We're talking about ritual impurity. So the one thing that we can do is basically rule out that anyone in this passage is talking about whether or not you're allowed to eat pork. Hmm. Because that's just absolutely not the topic here, right? Right. Yeah. The Pharisees are not saying, "Why do your disciples eat what Moses prohibited?" They don't say that. They say, "Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders by not washing their hands?" Okay, so there's one other distinction that we have to add in here. The Pharisees accepted a certain oral tradition of the tradition of the elders, which they followed alongside the Torah. Now, they would not have called this, in my opinion, they would not have called this an oral Torah. They would understand that this was a separate tradition and that it was subordinate to the law of God. So it's a bunch of recommendations, guidelines per se, about what to do in order to make sure you're keeping yourself obeying the Torah. And one of the things that those elders passed down, for some reason, was the practice of washing your hands before you eat normal food. Now, apparently, the reason for this was to avoid ingesting an impure entity or impure food.