Statement

Outside the Temple, many Jews shared habits of their own, such as the Sabbath and the synagogue, upheld in Palestine and the diaspora alike. For reasons still obscure, ritual purity gained weight, at least in Jerusalem and Palestine. Impurity was thought of as a contagion, coming from bodily fluids, corpses or non-Jews defiled by idolatry; it was not an illness, but it had to be removed before drawing near the holy. To that end people used stone vessels, a material deemed immune to impurity, and the ritual bath, the mikveh.

References

1. p. 106

   supports · main text · ch. 4

   Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman. The Jews: A History. 3rd edition. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2019.

   Verification anchor recorded · checked against the page text