Uncleanness

Robert Alter

• Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation by Mary Douglas
  Oxford, 211 pp, £45.00, November 2004, ISBN 0 19 926523 2

Ever since Mary Douglas’s anthropological foray into the laws of impurity in Leviticus in Purity and Danger (1966), her work on the Bible has been constantly stimulating and, at its best, deeply instructive. Over the past fifteen years she has devoted most of her still formidable energies to biblical topics, even acquiring a degree of competence in biblical Hebrew. The present volume includes a succinct and highly effective reprise of her Leviticus as Literature (1999), with some defence of its argument in response to the criticism it elicited. Jacob’s Tears promotes two different and not necessarily related theses, one historical, signalled in the title and subtitle of the book, and the other anthropological. Both theses are argued with exemplary clarity and vigour, but the historical proposal is a good deal less convincing than the anthropological one.