99 Jodi Magness This Book by Jodi Magness Began As a Work on The

Book Reviews 99

Jodi Magness Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Paperback. Pp. xv + 335. $25.00. ISBN 978-0802865588.

This book by Jodi Magness began as a work on the archaeology of purity that was to correlate the literary and archaeological practices of the major Jewish groups and sects of the Second Temple Period. In light of comments on the first draft, Magness revised the book to its present form to focus on aspects of Jewish daily life in late Second Temple Palestine. The title, which was undoubt- edly chosen by the publisher to increase sales, is somewhat misleading. Although written for a general audience, this book is a serious scholarly study. The endnotes take up nearly a third of the work and contain detailed discus- sions of the primary sources. The book contains ten chapters on the following topics: purity rituals; creeping and swarming creatures; household vessels; dining customs and communal meals; Sabbath observance and fasting; coins; clothing and tzitzit; oil and spit; toilet habits; tombs and burial customs; and an epilogue that highlights changes pertaining to purity following the 70 C.E. destruction of the Jerusalem temple. In the opening chapter, Magness introduces the reader to three assump- tions regarding the major movements and sects she discusses in the volume, namely the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and Jesus’ movement. First, she associates the Sadducees with the Jerusalem elite or governing class, including some (but not all) high priests and aristocracy. Second, she views the Pharisees as related, but not identical, to the rabbis of the post-70 C.E. era. This assumption allows her to include much evidence from the rabbinic cor- pus to explain Second Temple period texts and archaeological findings that pertain to purity. Third, she identifies the group that settled at Qumran and the wider movement of which it was a part with Josephus’s Essenes. However, Magness typically refers to the group at Qumran as the Qumran community, the Qumran sect, or sectarians. She largely reserves the term Essene for dis- cussions of the testimony of ancient authors who document their lifestyle. Although Magness’s book contains a wealth of information pertaining to Jewish purity of the Second Temple period, her observations on Qumran are perhaps the most important part of the volume. The remainder of this review focuses on selected aspects of her treatment of the Qumran community that raise wider historical and theological questions. Magness’s book in many respects is an archaeological parallel to the semi- nal volume of Albert I. Baumgarten on Jewish sectarianism (The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era [Brill, 1997]). Baumgarten proposes that the major Jewish groups (with the exception of the Jesus movement) which

Magness examines flourished beginning with the Maccabean era and beyond, and that Jewish independence provided an impulse for them to attempt to realize their platforms. Magness provides one important example of a possible sectarian marker at Qumran based on the findings of Andrea Berlin at Gamla that sheds light on possible changes in Jewish purity in reaction to historical events. Berlin discovered a dramatic decline in the number of serving vessels and tableware at Gamla during the first century C.E. This suggests that the inhabitants ate directly out of cooking pots, and possibly used bread to hold their food. Berlin also notes that Eastern Terra Sigillata A (ESA), a fine ceramic tableware, largely disappears from Jewish sites throughout the Galilee at this time. This disappearance appears to coincide with an increase in the appear- ance of chalk vessels, which may indicate that some Jews considered ESA to be impure. This finding has important implications for understanding Qumran, where ESA and other imports are rare. Magness notes that the majority of Qumran vessels subjected to Neutron Activation Analysis were made of clay that emanated from Jerusalem and a non-Jerusalem source. Because of the cost and difficulty of transport, Magness suggests that many of the Qumran vessels were made of clay brought to the site from Jerusalem. She suggests that because pottery vessels transported overland from Jerusalem could have incurred impurity, the vessels were likely produced at Qumran. Magness expands her coverage of ceramics to examine the archaeological site of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. She notes that Josephus’s use of the term kathisantōn in his description of the Essenes (War 2.130) appears to be reflected in the absence of couches in Qumran’s communal dining rooms. She suggests this indicates that the sectarians sat during meals instead of reclining in the Greco-Roman manner. The large number of individual dishes—plates, cups, and bowls in the pantries attached to the two communal dining rooms at Qumran (L86 and L114)—indicates that members were concerned that impurity could be spread through sharing food and drink. She suggests that Josephus mentioned that each member of the Essenes received his own individual dish not only for ascetic reasons, but because of the sect’s purity con- cerns (War 2.132–33). Following a proposal of Jacob Milgrom, Magness suggests that the Essenes served measured amounts of food and drink because they considered their pure food analogous to terumah. She suggests the juxtaposi- tion of food and terumah in later Jewish literature (m. Zabim 5:12; b. Šabb. 14a) indicates that the distinctive vessels commonly identified as scroll jars were also used to store pure food and drink. If the Qumran sectarians measured out their food in equal portions as described by Josephus, this may indicate that they considered their pure food analogous to terumah. If correct, this would have important implications for understanding the lifestyle of the Qumran

Dead Sea Discoveries 21 (2014) 82–129