How did Jews in the land of Israel use the toilet some 2,000 years ago? The legendary Dead Sea Scrolls offer some answers.
By ROSSELLA TERCATINVolunteers with the Israeli Antique Authority work at the Cave of the Skulls, an excavation site in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, Israel June 1, 2016.(photo credit: REUTERS/RONEN ZEVULUN)
How did Jews in the land of Israel use the toilet some 2,000 years ago? What kind of facilities did they build, and which social habits did they develop?Some answers are offered by the legendary Dead Sea Scrolls and the archaeological remains in ancient Qumran, Prof. Jodi Magness, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, revealed in an online lecture on Monday.Speaking at the Dead Sea Scrolls Conference organized by New York University, the Antiquities Authorities (IAA) and the Friends of the IAA, Magness explained how combining the information provided by some toilets unearthed in the region with some texts on the topic featured in the scrolls and written by other contemporary authors, a solution to a great dilemma can be found to the question of whether ancient Jews used to relieve themselves sitting or squatting.“I got into all of this when way back in the 1990s, the first volume of the final reports on de Vaux excavations was published, and while reading through it, I noticed a reference by de Vaux to an installation that he found in one of the rooms at Qumran, Lucas 51, which he identified possibly as a toilet,” Magness said, referring to the work of Roland de Vaux, a Catholic priest and archaeologist who was director of the Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem between 1945 and 1965.The Dead Sea Scrolls are a corpus of some 25,000 fragments unearthed in caves by the Dead Sea in the 1940s and 1950s. The artifacts include some of the most ancient manuscripts of the Bible, other religious texts that were not accepted in the canon as well as nonreligious writings.Qumran was the nearby settlement, which some experts believe was home to a specific Jewish sect, the Essenes, who many identified as the authors of the scrolls, or at least of a significant part of them.The toilet found in Qumran was found adjacent to a ritual bath and was dug in the dirt floor of the room. Its sides were covered in dirty mud and a terracotta pipe, with some stones found around it.According to Magness, in spite of the lack of a toilet seat at the site, its original presence might be deduced by evidence that several similar toilets were uncovered in the region, including in the City of David in Jerusalem.Therefore, while squatting toilets were known to exist in the ancient Near East, it appears they were not the kind of facilities used by ancient Judeans, she said.“We can find out more about the toilet habits of the Qumran sect based on information from the Dead Sea Scrolls,” she added.
Toilets were referred to as “place of the hand.”“There shall be a space between all their camps and the place of the hand, about two thousand cubits, and no unseemly evil thing shall be seen in the vicinity of their encampment,” reads a passage from the so-called ‘War Scroll’ (1QM).“And you shall make them a place for a hand outside the city, to which they shall go out, to the northwest of the city – roofed houses with pits within them into which the excrement will descend, so that it will not be visible at any distance from the city, three thousand cubits,” an excerpt from the “Temple Scroll” (11 QT) prescribes.A vivid testimony of the issue is also provided by Josephus, who wrote that the group would refrain from defecating on Shabbat, and on weekdays they would find remote spots, cover the excrement and purify themselves afterward – even though it was not required by the laws of Jewish purity.“If we boil it down, this group had two main points of concern with regard to the toilet habits,” Magness said. “One was shielding defecation and excrement from God’s view and from the views of others as something that is indecent that must be shielded. The second was an association of defecation and excrement with ritual impurity.”
