Ablution

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Ablution. See Purification.
Smith's Bible Dictionary
By Dr. William Smith.Published in 1863

purification by washing the body, either in whole or part. Ablutions appear to be almost as ancient as external worship itself. Moses enjoined them; the Heathens adopted them; and Mohammed and his followers have continued them: thus they have been introduced among most nations, and make a considerable part of all superstitious religions. The Egyptian priests had their diurnal and nocturnal ablutions; the Grecians, their sprinklings; the Romans, their lustrations and lavations; the Jews, their washings of hands and feet, beside their baptisms; the ancient Christians used ablution before communion, which the Romish church still retains before the mass, sometimes after; the Syrians, Copts, &c., have their solemn washings on Good Friday; the Turks their greater and less ablutions, &c.
Lustration, among the Romans, was a solemn ceremony by which they purified their cities, fields, armies, or people, after any crime or impurity. Lustrations might be performed by fire, by sulphur, by water, and by air; the last was applied by ventilation, or fanning the thing to be purified. All sorts of people, slaves excepted, might perform some kind of lustration.
When a person died the house was to be swept in a particular manner; new married persons were sprinkled by the priest with water. People sometimes, by way of purification, ran several times naked through the streets. There was scarcely any action performed, at the beginning and end of which some ceremony was not required to purify themselves and appease the gods.
Biblical and Theological Dictionary by Richard Watson
PRINTER 1849.

ab-lū?shun: The rite of ablution for religious purification seems to have been practiced in some form in all lands and at all times. The priests of Egypt punctiliously practiced it (Herodotus ii.37). The Greeks were warned ?never with unwashed hands to pour out the black wine at morn to Zeus? (Hesiod, Opera et Dies v.722; compare Homer, Iliad vi.266; Od. iv.759). The Romans also observed it (Virgil, Aeneid ii.217); as did and do Orientals in general (compare Koran, Sura Rom_5:8, etc.).
Ablutions for actual or ritual purification form quite a feature of the Jewish life and ceremonial. No one was allowed to enter a holy place or to approach God by prayer or sacrifice without having first performed the rite of ablution, or ?sanctification,? as it was sometimes called (Exo_19:10; 1Sa_16:5; 2Ch_29:5; compare Josephus, Ant, XIV, xi, 5).
Three kinds of washing are recognized in Biblical and rabbinical law: (1) washing of the hands, (2) washing of the hands and feet, and (3) immersion of the whole body in water. (1 and 2 = Greek νιπτω, niptō; 3 = Greek λούω, loúō).
Something more than an echo of a universal practice is found in the Scriptures. The rabbis claimed to find support for ceremonial hand-washing in Lev_15:11. David's words, ?I will wash my hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O Yahweh? (Psa_26:6; compare Psa_73:13), are regarded by them as warranting the inference that ablution of the hands was prerequisite to any holy act. This is the form of ablution, accordingly, which is most universally and scrupulously practiced by Jews. Before any meal of which bread forms a part, as before prayer, or any act of worship, the hands must be solemnly washed in pure water; as also after any unclean bodily function, or contact with any unclean thing. Such handwashings probably arose naturally from the fact that the ancients ate with their fingers, and so were first for physical cleansing only; but they came to be ceremonial and singularly binding. The Talmud abundantly shows that eating with unwashed hands came to be reckoned a matter of highest importance - ?tantamount to committing an act of unchastity, or other gross crime.? Akiba, when in prison, went without water given him to quench his thirst, rather than neglect the rite of ablution ('Er. 216). Only in extreme cases, according to the Mishna, as on a battlefield, might people dispense with it. Simeon, the Essene, ?the Saint? (Toseph. Kēlı̄m i.6), on entering the holy place without having washed his hands, claiming that he was holier than the high priest because of his ascetic life, was excommunicated, as undermining the authority of the Elders (compare ‛Edūy. 5 6).
Washing of the hands and feet is prescribed by the Law only for those about to perform priestly functions (compare Koran, Sura 5 8, in contrast: ?When ye prepare yourselves for prayer, wash your faces and hands up to the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles?; Hughes, Dict. of Islam). For example, whenever Moses or Aaron or any subordinate priest desired to enter the sanctuary (Tabernacle) or approach the altar, he was required to wash his hands and feet from the layer which stood between the Tabernacle and the altar (Exo_30:19; Exo_40:31). The same rule held in the Temple at Jerusalem. The washing of the whole body, however, is the form of ablution most specifically and exactingly required by the Law. The cases in which the immersion of the whole body is commanded, either for purification or consecration, are very numerous. For example, the Law prescribed that no leper or other unclean person of the seed of Aaron should eat of holy flesh until he had washed his whole body in water (Lev_22:4-6); that anyone coming in contact with a person having an unclean issue, or with any article used by such a one, should wash his whole body (Lev_15:5-10); that a sufferer from an unclean issue (Lev_15:16, Lev_15:18); a menstruous woman (2Sa_11:2, 2Sa_11:4), and anyone who touched a menstruous woman, or anything used by her, should likewise immerse the whole person in water (Lev_15:19-27): that the high priest who ministered on the Day of Atonement (Lev_16:24-28), the priest who tended the red heifer (Num_19:7, Num_19:8, Num_19:19), and every priest at his installation (Exo_29:4; Exo_40:12) should wash his whole body in water. Compare 'divers baptisms' (immersions) in Heb_9:10, and see Broadus on Mt 15:2-20 with footnote. (For another view on bathing see Kennedy in HDB, I, 257 v.)
Bathing in the modern and non-religious sense is rarely mentioned in the Scriptures (Exo_2:5 Pharaoh's daughter; 2Sa_11:2 the Revised Version (British and American) Bathsheba, and the interesting case 1Ki_22:38). Public baths are first met with in the Greek period - included in the ?place of exercise? (1 Macc 1:14), and remains of such buildings from the Roman period are numerous. Recently a remarkable series of bath-chambers have been discovered at Gezer, in Palestine, in connection with a building which is supposed to be the palace built by Simon Maccabeus (Kennedy (illust. in PEFS, 1905, 294f)).
The rite of ablution was observed among early Christians also. Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica, X, 4.40) tells of Christian churches being supplied with fountains or basins of water, after the Jewish custom of providing the laver for the use of the priests. The Apostolical Constitutions (VIII.32) have the rule: ?Let all the faithful ... when they rise from sleep, before they go to work, pray, after having washed themselves? , nı̄psámenoǐ.
The attitude of Jesus toward the rabbinical law of ablution is significant. Mk (Mar_7:3) prepares the way for his record of it by explaining, 'The Pharisees and all the Jews eat not except they wash their hands to the wrist (, pugmé). (See LTJM, II, 11). According to Mt 15:1-20 and Mk 7:1-23 Pharisees and Scribes that had come from Jerusalem (i.e. the strictest) had seen some of Jesus' disciples eat bread with unwashed hands, and they asked Him: ?Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.? Jesus' answer was to the Jews, even to His own disciples, in the highest degree surprising, paradoxical, revolutionary (compare Mat_12:8). They could not but see that it applied not merely to hand-washing, but to the whole matter of clean and unclean food; and this to them was one of the most vital parts of the Law (compare Act_10:14). Jesus saw that the masses of the Jews, no less than the Pharisees, while scrupulous about ceremonial purity, were careless of inward purity. So here, as in the Sermon on the Mount, and with reference to the Sabbath (Mat_12:1), He would lead them into the deeper and truer significance of the Law, and thus prepare the way for setting aside not only the traditions of the eiders that made void the commandments of God, but even the prescribed ceremonies of the Law themselves, if need be, that the Law in its higher principles and meanings might be ?fulfilled.? Here He proclaims a principle that goes to the heart of the whole matter of true religion in saying: ?Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites? (Mar_7:6-13) - you who make great pretense of devotion to God, and insist strenuously on the externals of His service, while at heart you do not love Him, making the word of God of none effect for the sake of your tradition!
Literature
For list of older authorities see McClintock and Strong, Cyclopedia; Nowack, Biblische Archaeologie, II, 275-99; and Spitzer, Ueber Baden und Bader bei den alten Hebraern, 1884.
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
PRINTER 1915.

Ablution, the ceremonial washing, whereby, as a symbol of purification from uncleanness, a person was considered?
to be cleansed from the taint of an inferior and less pure condition, and initiated into a higher and purer state (Lev_8:6);
to be cleansed from the soil of common life, and fitted for special acts of religious service (Exo_30:17-21);
to be cleansed from defilements contracted by particular acts or circumstances, and restored to the privileges of ordinary life (Leviticus 12-15);
as absolving or purifying himself, or declaring himself absolved and purified, from the guilt of a particular act (Deu_21:1-9).
We do not meet with any such ablutions in patriarchal times: but under the Mosaic dispensation they all occur.
After the rise of the sect of the Pharisees, the practice of ablution was carried to such excess, from the affectation of excessive purity, that it is repeatedly brought under our notice in the New Testament through the severe animadversions of our Savior on the consummate hypocrisy involved in this fastidious attention to the external types of moral purity, while the heart was left unclean. All the practices there exposed come under the head of purification from uncleanness?the acts involving which were made so numerous that persons of the stricter sect could scarcely move without contracting some involuntary pollution. For this reason they never entered their houses without ablution, from the strong probability that they had unknowingly contracted some defilement in the streets; and they were especially careful never to eat without washing the hands (Mar_7:1-5), because they were peculiarly liable to be defiled; and as unclean hands were held to communicate uncleanness to all food (excepting fruit) which they touched, it was deemed that there was no security against eating unclean food but by always washing the hands ceremonially before touching any meat. The Israelites, who, like other Orientals, fed with their fingers, washed their hands before meals, for the sake of cleanliness [WASHING]. But these customary washings were distinct from the ceremonial ablutions. It was the latter which the Pharisees judged to be so necessary. When therefore some of that sect remarked that our Lord's disciples ate 'with unwashen hands' (Mar_7:2), it is not to be understood literally that they did not at all wash their hands, but that they did not plunge them ceremonially according to their own practice. In at least an equal degree the Pharisees multiplied the ceremonial pollutions which required the ablution of inanimate objects?'cups and pots, brazen vessels and tables;' the rules given in the law (Lev_6:28; Lev_11:32-36; Lev_15:23) being extended to these multiplied contaminations. Articles of earthenware which were of little value were to be broken; and those of metal and wood were to be scoured and rinsed with water.
The Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature
by John Kitto.

Ablution
is a name for the wine and water used by the priest after communion to cleanse the chalice and his fingers. — At one time the priest was required to drink it. The water-drain was always erected near the altar to receive the ablution.
I. the ceremonial washing, whereby, as a symbol of purification from uncleanness, a person was considered
(1.) to be cleansed from the taint of an inferior and less pure condition, and initiated into a higher and purer state;
(2.) to be cleansed from the soil of common life, and fitted for special acts of religious service;
(3.) to be cleansed from defilements contracted by particular acts or circumstances, and restored to the privileges of ordinary life;
(4.) as absolving or purifying himself, or declaring himself absolved and purified, from the guilt of a particular act.
We do not meet with any such ablutions in patriarchal times; but under the Mosaical dispensation they are all indicated. SEE LUSTRATION; SEE SPRINKLING. A marked example of the first kind of ablution occurs when Aaron and his sons, on their being set apart for the priesthood, were washed with water before they were invested with the priestly robes and anointed with the holy oil (Lev_8:6). To this head we are inclined to refer the ablution of persons and raiment which was required of the whole of the Israelites, as a preparation to their receiving the law from Sinai (Exo_19:10-15). We also find examples of this kind of purification in connection with initiation into some higher state both among the Hebrews and in other nations. Thus those admitted into the mysteries of Eleusis were previously purified on the banks of the Ilissus by water being poured upon them by the Hydranos (Polyaen. 5:17; 3:11). SEE CONSECRATION.
The second kind of ablution was that which required the priests, on pain of death, to wash their hands and their feet before they approached the altar of God (Exo_30:17-21). For this purpose a large basin of water was provided both at the tabernacle and at the temple. SEE LAVER. To this the Psalmist alludes when he says, “I will wash my hands in innocency, and so will I compass thine altar” (Psa_26:6). Hence it became the custom in the early Christian Church for the ministers, in the view of the congregation, to wash their hands in a basin of water brought by the deacon, at the commencement of the communion (Jamieson, p. 126); and this practice, or something like it, is still retained in the Eastern churches, as well as in the Church of Rome, when mass is celebrated. SEE HOLY WATER.
Similar ablutions by the priests before proceeding to perform the more sacred ceremonies were usual among the heathen (see Smith's Dict. of Class. Antiq. s.v. Chernips). The Egyptian priests indeed carried the practice to a burdensome extent (Wilkinson, 1:324, abridgm.), from which the Jewish priests were, perhaps designedly, exonerated; and in their less torrid climate it was, for purposes of real cleanliness, less needful. Reservoirs of water were attached to the Egyptian temples; and Herodotus (2:37) informs us that the priests shaved the whole of their bodies every third day, that no insect or other filth might be upon them when they served the gods, and that they washed themselves in cold water twice every day and twice every night; Porphyry says thrice a day, with a nocturnal ablution occasionally. This kind of ablution, as preparatory to a religious act, answers to the simple wadu of the Moslems, which they are required to go through five times daily before their stated prayers (see Lane, Mod. Eg. 1:94 sq.), besides other private purifications of a more formal character (see Reland, De Relig. Moh. p. 80-83). This makes the ceremonies of ablution much more conspicuous to a traveler in the Moslem East at the present day than they would appear among the ancient Jews, seeing that the law imposed this obligation on the priests only, not on the people. Connected as these Moslem ablutions are with various forms and imitative ceremonies, and recurring so frequently as they do, the avowedly heavy yoke of even the Mosaic law seems light in the comparison. SEE BATHE.
In the third class of ablutions washing is regarded as a purification from positive defilements. The Mosaical law recognises eleven species of uncleanness of this nature (Lev_12:1-8; Lev_13:1-59; Lev_14:1-57; Lev_15:1-33), the purification for which ceased at the end of a certain period, provided the unclean person then washed his body and his clothes; but in a few cases, such as leprosy and the defilement contracted by touching a dead body, he remained unclean seven days after the physical cause of pollution had ceased. This was all that the law required; but in later times, when the Jews began to refine upon it, these cases were considered generic instead of specific — as representing classes instead of individual cases of defilement — and the causes of pollution requiring purification by water thus came to be greatly increased. This kind of ablution for substantial uncleanness answers to the Moslem ghusl (Lane, ib. p. 99; Reland, ib. p. 66-77), in which the causes of defilement greatly exceed those of the Mosaical law, while they are perhaps equalled in number and minuteness by those which the later Jews devised. The uncleanness in this class arises chiefly from the natural secretions of human beings and of beasts used for food, and from the ordure of animals not used for food; and, as among the Jews, the defilement may be communicated not only to persons, but to clothes, utensils, and dwelling — in all which cases the purification must be made by water, or by some representative act where water cannot be applied. Thus in drought or sickness the rinsing of the hands and face may be performed with dry sand or dust, a ceremony that is termed tayemmum (Lane, ib.). SEE UNCLEANNESS.
Of the last class of ablutions, by which persons declared themselves free from the guilt of a particular action, the most remarkable instance is that which occurs in the expiation for an unknown murder, when the elders of the nearest village washed their hands over the expiatory heifer, beheaded in the valley, saying, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it” (Deu_21:1-9). It has been thought by some that the signal act of Pilate, when he washed his hands in water and declared himself innocent of the blood of Jesus (Mat_27:24), was a designed adoption of the Jewish custom; but this supposition does not appear necessary, as the practice was also common among the Greeks and Romans (see Smith's Dict. of Class. Antig. s.v. Lustratio). SEE MURDER.
Other practices not indicated in the law appear to have existed at a very early period, or to have grown up in the course of time. From 1Sa_16:5, compared with Exo_19:10-14, we learn that it was usual for those who presented or provided a sacrifice to purify themselves by ablution; and as this was everywhere a general practice, it may be supposed to have existed in patriarchal times, and, being an established and approved custom, not to have required to be mentioned in the law. There is a passage in the apocryphal book of Judith (12:7-9) which has been thought to intimate that the Jews performed ablutions before prayer. But we cannot fairly deduce that meaning from it (comp. Rth_3:3); since it is connected with the anointing (q.v.), which was a customary token of festivity (see Arnald, in loc.). It would indeed prove too much if so understood, as Judith bathed in the water, which is more than even the Moslems do before their prayers. Moreover, the authority, if clear, would not be conclusive. SEE PURIFICATION.
But after the rise of the sect of the Pharisees, the practice of ablution was carried to such excess, from the affectation of extraordinary purity, that it is repeatedly brought under our notice in the New Testament through the several animadversions of our Savior on the consummate hypocrisy involved in this fastidious attention to the external types of moral purity, while the heart was left unclean (e.g. Mat_23:25). All the practices there exposed come under the head of purification from uncleanness; the acts involving which were made so numerous that persons of the stricter sect could scarcely move without contracting some involuntary pollution. For this reason they never entered their houses without ablution, from the strong probability that they had unknowingly contracted some defilement in the streets; and they were especially careful never to eat without washing the hands (Mar_7:1-5), because they were peculiarly liable to be defiled; and as unclean hands were held to communicate uncleanness to all food (excepting fruit) which they touched, it was deemed that there was no security against eating unclean food but by always washing the hands ceremonially before touching any meat. We say “ceremonially,” because this article refers only to ceremonial washing. The Israelites, who, like other Orientals, fed with their fingers, washed their hands before meals for the sake of cleanliness. SEE EATING. But these customary washings were distinct from the ceremonial ablutions, as they are now among the Moslems. There were, indeed, distinct names for them. The former was called simply נְטַילָה, netilah', or washing, in which water was poured upon the hands; the latter was called , טְבַילָה, tebilah', plunging, because the hands were immersed in water (Lightfoot on Mar_7:4). It was this last, namely, the ceremonial ablution, which the Pharisees judged to be so necessary. When, therefore, some of that sect remarked that our Lord's disciples ate “with unwashen hands” (Mar_7:2), it is not to be understood literally that they did not at all wash their hands, but that they did not plunge them ceremonially according to their own practice (πυγμῇ not “oft,” as in the Auth. Vers., but with the fist, q. d. “up to the elbow,” as Theophylact interprets). And this was expected from them only as the disciples of a religious teacher; for these refinements were not practiced by the class of people from which the disciples were chiefly drawn. Their wonder was, that Jesus had not inculcated this observance on his followers, and not, as some have fancied, that he had enjoined them to neglect what had been their previous practice. (See Otho, Lex. Rabb. s.v. Lotio.) SEE WASH.
In at least an equal degree the Pharisees multiplied the ceremonial pollutions which required the ablution of inanimate objects — “cups and pots, brazen vessels and tables” — the rules given in the law (Lev_6:28; Lev_11:32-36; Lev_15:23) being extended to these multiplied contaminations. Articles of earthenware which were of little value were to be broken, and those of metal and wood were to be scoured and rinsed with water. All these matters are fully described by Buxtorf, Lightfoot, Schottgen, Gill, and other writers of the same class, who present many striking illustrations of the passages of Scripture which refer to them. The Mohammedan usages of ablution, which offer very clear analogies, are fully detailed in the third book of the Mishkat ul-Masabih (or “Collection of Musselman Traditions,” translated from the Arabic by A. N. Matthews, Calcutta, 1809, 2 vols. 4to), and also in D'Ohsson's Tableau, liv. 1, chap. 1. SEE BAPTISM.
II. In the Roman Church ablution is a liturgical term, denoting the use of wine and water by the priest, after communion, to cleanse the chalice and his fingers. Two ablutions are made in the mass.
1. Wine alone is poured into the chalice, in order to disengage the particles, of either kind, which may be left adhering to the vessel, and is afterward drunk by the priest.
2. Wine and water are poured upon the priest's fingers into the chalice (see Boissonnet, Dict. des Rites, 1,65). SEE MASS.
III. In the Greek Church, ablution is a ceremony observed seven days after baptism, wherein the unction of the chrism is washed off from those who have been baptized (King, Greek Church). SEE CHRISM.
For the literature of the subject, in general, see T. Dassorius, De lustratione Judaeorum (Viteb. 1692); A. Froelund, De χειροκαιποδουιψίᾷ sacerdotum Hebraeorum (Hafn. 1695); O. Sperling, De baptismo ethnicorum (Hafn. 1700); J. Behm, De lotione Judoeorum et Christianorum: (Regiom. 1715); J. G. Leschner, De lustrationibus vett. gentilium praecidaneis (Viteb. 1709); J. Lomeier, De vett. gentilium lustrationibus (Ultraj. 1681, 1701); H. Lubert, De antiquo lavandi ritu (Lubec, 1670); J. J. Miller, De igne lustrico (Jen. 1660); T. Pfanner, De lotionibus Christianorum, in his Observ. Eccles. 1, 364-421. SEE WATER.

CYCLOPEDIA OF BIBLICAL, THEOLOGICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL
press 1895.

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