(Continued)
Too much pride by males in their long hair was dangerously immoral, as the story of Absalom showed: he gloried in his hair, so he was hanged by it. A few hairstyles were specially forbidden by the rabbis in the Tosefta on the grounds that they looked too gentile and therefore smacked of idolatry or magic: “What are the matters which constitute ‘the ways of the Amorites?’ He who trims the front of his hair, and he who makes his locks grow long, and he who makes a baldness in front for a particular star…” But these restrictions are the exception that prove the rule, that Jews generally looked like non-Jews. Romans often noted that foreign peoples looked different from themselves, but (apart from male circumcision) they never noticed this of the Jews. One passing remark by a Roman author does, however, suggest that some Romans thought Jews had a distinctive smell: the historian
Ammianus Marcellinus recorded in the fourth century CE a comment of the philosopher Marcus Aurelius in the second century CE about the Jews as malodorous. This was not a standard form of abuse of other people in the Roman world. It may even have some basis in a real difference. If modesty requires more clothing, in a hot climate old sweaty clothes may become smelly. If everyone smells equally, no one notices, and the issue of body odour (except of tanners) fails to surface in the Jewish texts.
Another quote, this time from Jodi Magness’
The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls (pp. 194-7). In context she’s talking about the Qumran sect:
A sleeveless tunic (Greek
chiton; Hebrew
haluq), covered by a large, rectangular mantle (Greek
himation; Roman
pallium; Hebrew
tallit or
me’il) were worn by both men and women in Roman Palestine (see Fig. 60). The Roman toga was analogous to a mantle but differed in having a curved hem. The tunic consisted of a large rectangular sheet woven with two parallel bands of a different color that run from selvage to selvage and spaced widely apart. Whereas most Greek and Roman tunics were woven in a single piece, those from Masada and the
Cave of Letters were woven in two pieces and sewn together at the shoulders, leaving an opening for the neck (see Fig. 58). This feature facilitated adherence to the laws of purity, for if one half of the mantle
sic] became impure it could be removed and replaced without defiling the other half.
Narrow stripes woven into the tunics so that they descended into the shoulders characterized all tunics of the Roman period (see Fig. 58). Called
clavi in Latin and usually woven in shades of purple, these stripes defined the rank of the wearer (the broader the stripes, the higher the wearer’s rank). Yigael Yadin demonstrated that the Hebrew term for
clavus is
‘imrah. The mantles found in Masada and in the Cave of Letters are decorated with notched bands and gamma-shaped designs (see Fig. 59). The notched bands and gamma-shaped designs occur on mantles worn by both men and women. Jewish mantles were distinguished from non-Jewish ones by the attachment of
tzitzit (tassels) to the four corners of the man’s mantle. A bundle of dyed, unspun wool intended for
tzitzit was found in the Cave of Letters. Whereas some of the mantles from the Cave of Letters were colored, none of the tunics had any decorative elements aside from the
clavi. In contrast, colored tunics appear to be represented at Masada. With one exception, all of the linen textiles from Masada were undyed, whereas dyed color is found (with two exceptions only on wool textiles). Similarly, none of the linen textiles from the Cave of Letters has colored, decorative patterns. All of the textiles found at Masada and in the Cave of Letters conform to the halakhic injunction of
shaatnez, which prohibits mixing woolen and linen fibers in the same garment (from Deuteronomy 22:11: “Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse kinds, of woolen and linen together”) (see Fig. 63).
Except for the child’s shirt from the Cave of Letters, none of the linen textiles found there or at Masada belongs to garments. In other words, the garments worn by the Jewish men and women at Masada and in the Cave of Letters were made of wool. The linen child’s shirt from the Cave of letters is made of two identical sheets that were sewn together like a tunic. The shirt is decorated with two thin bands that are not colored and were formed of several weft threads that had been thrown together. These stripes or bands, which were created by using a different weave instead of a different color, are called self-stripes (see Fig. 63). Yadin suggested that this represented an attempt to imitate the clavi of the larger tunics while complying with the law of shaatnez (created on the one hand by the difficulty of dying linen and creating decorative colored patterns, and on the other by the prohibition against adding colored woolen bands). The child’s shirt was apparently some sort of inner garment. Pieces of an adult’s linen tunic with the same kind of self-stripes were discovered in one of the caves in Wadi Murabba’at. Another linen fragment with self-stripes was found in the cave of Avior near Jericho.
…] Although color was not confined to women’s clothes, the textiles from Masada and the Cave of Letters as well as iconographic and textual sources indicate that women’s clothing was more likely than men’s to be colored. In the Dura Europos synagogue paintings, for example, the men wear white or off-white mantles (with colored bands), while the women all wear colored garments. A Midrashic (interpretive) commentary on Deuteronomy (Sifre Deuteronomy 115b) states that “a woman shall not wear a man’s white garments and a man shall not wear colored garments.” …]
