On Cultic Holiness: Between the Bible and Rabbinic Literature

Abstract

The Torah describes two distinct modes through which sanctity may be constituted: law and ritual. On the one hand, holiness is a quality acquired through obedience to the commandments; on the other hand, it is a tangible quality established through ritual means: God sanctifies the Tabernacle through His presence, and the priests sanctify the Tabernacle and its vessels through the anointing oil. This form of holiness is a property transmissible by contact, much like impurity, as expressed in the legal formula: “Whoever touches X shall become holy/impure.” This dual aspect is mirrored in holiness’s opposite—impurity, which arises, on the one hand, from sin (“moral impurity”) and, on the other, from bodily conditions (“ritual impurity”). Yet, whereas the laws governing the transmission of impurity from object to object by contact were elaborated extensively in Second Temple and rabbinic literature, the laws of holiness transmitted by contact gradually faded over the generations. This transformation is reflected in the radical reduction of the biblical rule, “Whatever touches the altar shall be holy” (Exod 29:37), into the Tannaitic halakhah that “the altar sanctifies [only] that which is fit for it” (m. Zevahim 9:1). Scholars who have noted the tension between legal and cultic holiness have interpreted this reduction as evidence of a broader religious development: a movement from the irrational to the rational, from the physical to the abstract, from the amoral to the moral, or from the demonic and magical to the monotheistic. Yet such descriptions miss the fundamental transformation that the notion of contagion underwent over time: from a negative conception, centered on fear of dangerous holiness whose contact entailed harmful consequences and therefore required removal, to a positive conception, in which the “contagious” power of holiness became a ritual instrument—an integral stage in the sacrificial process itself. The idea of contagious holiness was not erased, diminished, or neutralized, but rather translated and transformed into a deliberate and constitutive legal act within Tannaitic literature. Contagious holiness is thus not an “archaeological survival” frozen in the world of the sages, but a cornerstone of their halakhic edifice. The first part of the article (sections I–III) surveys the evidence for the doctrine of holiness in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple literature; section IV examines its displacement in the ancient translations of the Torah; and sections V–VI trace the transformation of the idea of contagious holiness in rabbinic literature.