ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva published her purity-focused “Essay on Abjection” (titled Powers of Horror ) in 1980, with the Columbia University Press English language edition following closely thereafter (1982). By this time, Kristeva was already an established, respected and even famous theoretician of semiotics. But she was not known as a biblical scholar, so it may have been somewhat surprising – perhaps, indeed puzzling – that a substantial portion of the book seeks to illuminate concepts of defi lement and purifi cation as they appear in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
