Washing in Water: Trajectories of Ritual Bathing in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature.

• Author: Klawans, Jonathan

Washing in Water: Trajectories of Ritual Bathing in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature. By JONATHAN D. LAWRENCE. Academia Biblica, vol. 23. Atlanta: SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE, 2006. Pp. xix + 294, illus. $47.95 (paper).

The work under review constitutes the published version of the author's 2003 Notre Dame dissertation, written under the primary direction of James C. VanderKam. Judging from the bibliography (which contains few references later than 2000, and none later than 2003), the work has not been substantially revised. Following an introduction entitled "Questions about Ritual Bathing" (pp. 1-21), the work's chapters cover the stated topic in the Hebrew Bible (chapter 2, pp. 23-42), the literature of the Second Temple period (chapter 3, pp. 43-79), and the Dead Sea Scrolls (chapter 4, pp. 81-154). The fifth chapter (pp. 155-83) turns to the archaeological evidence. Following the conclusion (pp. 185-202), readers are supplied with twenty-five figures (mostly photographs of Jewish ritual bathing installations, along with maps indicating their locations, pp. 203-17). These are, in turn, followed by three appendices: a brief chart outlining biblical and Second Temple period bathing laws; an extensive list (pp. 221-50) of textual references, with data keyed to the author's own categorizations (see below), and an almost equally extensive chart (pp. 251-68) providing data pertaining to the archaeological remains. The final appendix, as the author grants, is based heavily on Ronny Reich's 1990 Hebrew University dissertation on Jewish ritual baths (which remains unpublished and untranslated). An author index and a scripture index wrap up the volume.

Titles can be misleading, and this proves to be the case here both with regard to the work's goals and its textual focus. The author's chapter structure separates the Dead Sea Scrolls from the rest of the Second Temple literature--a reasonable move considering the amount of evidence and the likely sectarian nature of at least a good portion of it. But the Scrolls chapter is longer than the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple chapters combined. Arguably, Qumran figures disproportionately in the archaeological chapter too. This does not necessarily reflect an unwise decision on the part of author, but a reader who judged the book by its title would have no reason to expect the Qumran focus either. Similarly problematic is the term "trajectory" (in addition to the title, see p. 13). The...