Commandments, Traditions and what defiles us.
Commandments, Traditions and what defiles us.
Next to the Qumran community, the Pharisees were the most scrupulous sect of Judaism with regard to matters of cleanness. Unclean for Pharisaic rabbis were any form of human excretion (spittle, semen, menstruation, etc.), women after childbirth, corpses, carrion, creeping things, idols, and certain classes of people, such as lepers, Samaritans, and Gentiles. This list implicates both Jesus and the disciples of several earlier violations of ritual uncleanness, since they have been with lepers (1:40), tax collectors (2:13), Gentiles (5:1), menstruating women (5:25), and corpses (5:35). Ritual washings were a means of cleansing and protecting observant Jews from the above defilements. (Further on the Pharisees, see at 2:18.)
It is important to understand that “cleanness” was not limited to or even primarily concerned with matters of hygiene, nor are distinctions between clean and unclean entirely understandable on the basis of rational explanation alone. The Mishnah, for instance, declared that the Aramaic sections of Daniel and Ezra rendered the hands of anyone who touched them unclean, as did the Holy Scriptures themselves if they were translated into Assyrian. On the other hand, translating the Aramaic sections of Scripture into Hebrew made them clean (m. Yad. 4:5). This text is one of many instances indicating that “cleanness” was a ritual or cultic distinction as opposed to a practical or hygienic distinction.
One way to convey the power of the Jewish distinction between clean and unclean, perhaps, is to draw a parallel with authoritarian societies and organizations, where people avoid all contact with a person who is under suspicion or who has been fired, for example, so as not to endanger their own position.
To modern readers the cleansing of objects listed in 7:2–5 may appear exaggerated. Some may even suspect Mark of anti-Jewish polemic. Neither appears to be the case, however. A variety of evidence from the first century essentially corroborates the Pharisaic obsession with purity as described by Mark. Jacob Neusner notes that the dominant trait of Pharisaism before A.D. 70, as depicted in both rabbinic traditions and the Gospels, concerns conditions regarding ritual purity. It is worth remembering that fully twenty-five percent of the Mishnah is devoted to questions of purity. Archaeological excavations continue to discover Jewish mikwa’ot or cleansing pools that were a standard feature of Jewish homes and settlements in the first century (see Mishnah, tractate Mikwa’ot). Mikwa’ot have even been uncovered on the summit of Masada, one of the most arid places on earth.
Corban was similar to the concept of deferred giving. Today a person may will property to a charity or institution at his or her death, though retaining possession over the property and the proceeds or interest accruing from it until then. In the case of Corban, a person could dedicate goods to God and withdraw them from ordinary use, although retaining control over them himself. In the example of v. 11, a son declares his property Corban, which at his death would pass into the possession of the temple. In the meantime, however, the son retains control over the property—and his control deprives his parents of the support that otherwise would have been derived from the property in their old age. T. W. Manson’s description of the practice is particularly trenchant: “A man goes through the formality of vowing something to God, not that he may give it to God, but in order to prevent some other person from having it.” This was not the end of the matter, however. Once property had been offered to God, priests discouraged anyone from withdrawing it from Corban in order to return it to human use. According to Josephus, priests required fifty shekels from a man, and thirty from a woman, to cancel Corban (Ant. 4.73). The practice of Corban resulted in egregious casuistry by annulling a moral commandment of the Torah (honor of parents) by a ritual practice of the oral tradition (Corban).