Biblical Personal Hygiene Habits

             This is almost never discussed in history classes and certainly not in churches, but, why not? I believe that the churches have been very deficient in their teaching ministry. If we want to really know about the people mentioned in the Bible, we need to know which languages they spoke and whether they were multilingual, what their political opinions were, what they wore, what they ate, what they read and studied, if they told jokes or had any concept of humor, how they settled personal disputes, if they played games, if they kept pets, how they conducted businesses, their prejudices and hatreds,  how their families were structured, their attitudes towards government, etc. They were normal people and were just as smart as we are, but without our accumulation of facts.

            They had the same common personal household and hygiene concerns we have. They had to cook, wash clothing, clean their teeth, take out the trash, clean and straighten the house, clean dirt from under their fingernails, take time to rest, bathe, try not to smell bad, and to clean themselves after urination and defecation. And yes, even Jesus. He was, after all, fully human. That may bother some people, but we must avoid the tendency to view Jesus as being too different from us. He was God and he was sinless and perfect, but he was also a human. To deny that is troublesome.

            There was an early Christian heresy named docetism (from the Greek infinitive δοκεῖν, meaning to appear or to seem to be) which held that Jesus only seemed to be human but was instead only fully divine. This was rejected by the Church because, if it were true, then Jesus only seemed to suffer and die on on the cross and his resurrection from the tomb was not real. Jesus had to be fully human and fully divine.

            Jesus was an orthodox Jewish man. The ancient Israelites, and later, the Jewish people, were one of the personally cleanest peoples. Some of the other cultures around them were only minimally interested.

            The Israelites were instructed in Deuteronomy 23:13-14 to bury their human waste outside their camp. They bathed and they washed their clothing. They were instructed to wash their feet and hands before serving in the Temple. Sick people were quarantined as were persons who had touched a corpse. If a dead animal was found in a water source, that water was not used.

            Certainly, all this cleaning, washing, and bathing was more for ritual purity than for what we now understand, because of our accumulated knowledge, to be proper hygiene.

            Perfumes and spices were used to mask personal body odor but were very expensive and beyond the reach of most of the common people. Washing and bathing was accomplished using clean water. The soaps used were not our modern soaps but were natural mineral products neter (נֶתֶר lye, alkali) and borit (בֹּרִית soap, lye, cleaning agent), which was a vegetable-based lye made from ashes. Jeremiah 2:22,  Malachi 3:2, and Proverbs 25:20.

In the matter of cleaning oneself after defecation, the method was originally to wipe with the left hand and then to rinse the hand with water. Raba (see below) said “Because the Torah was given with the right hand, as it says, ”At His right hand was a fiery law unto them.””

This is a very detailed discussion at https://toilet-guru.com>biblical_old. The left hand was considered to be unclean in many cultures because of its use in this way.

Later, ostraca (pieces of broken ceramic pottery) with smoothed edges were used to scrape and wipe. It made a lot more sense than just using your hand. This is mentioned in the Talmud in Shabbat 81 and Berachot 62a. The concerns discussed by the rabbis were the weights and sizes of the ostraca and when they could be used. The main concern was for ritual purity. www.talmudology.com

The use of the ostraca originated with the ancient Greeks who often wrote the names of their personal enemies on their own personal toilet ostraca.

Yes, scraping with stones sounds a little bit brutal to modern ears, no matter how well smoothed and polished the pieces of pottery may have been. And they were re-used!

The Romans considered themselves to be far more civilized and sophisticated than their occupied non-Roman populations. Instead of a piece of pottery, they used a tersorium (aka xylospongium), a sponge on a stick. Tersorium basically means a wiping thing.

The xylospogium (tersorium) was shared at the communal non-gender-specific public latrines in Roman towns and cities. It is generally believed that several tersori were passed around among all the people at the latrine, of course being cleaned between users, by dipping and swirling the item into a bucket of water and salt vinegar. It sounds lovely.

The tersori were first mentioned in the second century but were surely in use long before that time. The public latrines were surely too vulgar for wealthy Romans who either had their own sponges on a stick or used washable wool cloths.

In the matter of dental hygiene, the mention of cleanness of teeth in Amos 4:6 is a sarcastic reference to famine. Since there was nothing to eat, one’s teeth remained clean.

The ancient Jewish method for tooth cleaning was not as disgusting as the ostraca. They used miswak, chew sticks made of roots and twigs, to clean their teeth.

The Romans considered themselves to be far too advanced and sophisticated to use chew sticks like the barbarians did. They brushed their teeth (and washed their clothing) with urine and also used it as a mouthwash. The ammonia in the urine was believed to whiten the teeth and to remove stains from fabrics. They did not have Crest toothpaste, Tide detergent, or Listerine!

Raba: (I am not a Talmudic scholar, but I believe that Raba is Rabbah bar Nahmani (b.ca. 270 – d. ca. 320 AD/CE) who was considered to be the greatest Torah scholar in Babylon. He quoted Rabbi Akiba (b. 50 – d. 135) who said, “… it is proper to wipe with the left hand and not the right.”