Although not strictly belonging to the present inquiry, it may not be out of place to say a few words as to why contact with a holy object such as a roll of the Scriptures should be conceived of as bringing about a state of Levitical impurity. Some of the explanations which have been offered might be convincing if this particular form of the way in which Levitical impurity was brought about stood alone. But the fact is that other things involved a similar state of impurity, and one cannot restrict oneself to the explanation of one of these while leaving the rest out of consideration, because, as will be seen in studying the subject, identical conceptions lie ultimately at the base of all. How, for example, is one to account for the fact that both the touching of a holy thing like a scroll of the Law, as well as the touching of an unclean thing like a leper or a dead body (to mention no others),[228] was held to bring about a similar state of Levitical impurity and to require an ablution? That reverence for the dead could have had nothing to do with this is proved by the fact that a state of impurity was brought about not only by contact with a dead person, but equally so by contact with a dead animal. When one studies the laws of uncleanness in the Book of Leviticus and compares them with many customs prevalent among uncultured races,[229] one soon realizes the truth of Robertson Smith’s words that “the irrationality of laws of uncleanness, from the standpoint of spiritual religion, or even of the higher heathenism, is so manifest, that they must necessarily be looked on as having survived from an earlier form of faith and of society. And this being so, I do not see how any historical student can refuse to class them with savage taboos.”[230] Such survivals are to be seen in the laws of uncleanness in the Book of Leviticus, not that there was any idea of this when the writer of that book embodied in it those popular traditional rules and customs which had been in vogue for millenniums, any more than there was when the Pharisees decided that certain books should henceforth be regarded as so holy that the mere touch of them brought about Levitical impurity; they merely adopted the outward expression of an antique conception, the essential significance of which had been forgotten for untold ages.