ABSTRACT
This chapter engages an ancient text that continues to serve as scripture for almost three billion people alive today. A combination of contemporary and historical sources is necessary to understand the Bible's influences on pollution beliefs and practices today. The role of purification rituals in maintaining and crossing realms is relatively obvious when inscriptions on temple gates mandate purification before entry or when a shaman dictates requirements for admission to a ritual. Purity and pollution are obviously categories used for persuasion. Purification practices internalize standardized distinctions between polluted and pure so that they feel natural and innate. The reduction of purity to sex was encouraged in antiquity by the widespread adoption of a dualistic cosmological scale of infinite gradations between the grossly physical body and the immaterial spirit.
