If I feel dirty or just want a relaxing soak, I walk a few feet to my bathroom and I have a shower and bath waiting for me. Thanks to a tankless water heater, I have an endless supply of hot water. Thanks to plumbing, I have water just by opening a tap. Consequently, bathing is very routine for me. In ancient times, to bathe at home I would need to first transport a sufficient amount of water from whatever source I had (probably outside of my home) to the tub or shower receptacle. Water is heavy. Think about changing out a water cooler and that is nowhere near enough water for a bath. If I wanted hot water, I would need a fire large enough to heat this great quantity of water.

Most full -body bathing did not take place in the house. Rather, people went to bathhouses and this made bathing a more communal activity. Bathhouses might have a ready water source like a spring or a pipe from another source. Bathhouses employed various heating mechanisms, such as the Roman system of heating under the floors. Some bathhouses had hot spring feeders. We saw yesterday how Tiberias passed a pipe of cool fresh water through hot brackish water to heat their baths.

People bathed together and much like our golf courses today, they discussed business (or Torah). The Talmud has a lot of stories of sages visiting bathhouses. Today we get a few more of those stories as we continue to explore the rules around bathing and Shabbat. In fact, bathhouses presented a particular challenge for the Rabbis on Shabbat. At first, they allowed people to bathe in water that had been heated prior to Shabbat. The bathhouse attendants started lying about when water was heated, so the Rabbis prohibited bathing in hot water on Shabbat. The great (literally) unwashed masses did not like this prohibition and there was widespread disobedience. The Rabbis relented and prohibited bathing the entire body in heated hot water on Shabbat, but not from bathing individual limbs or our face in water heated before Shabbat. We are also allowed to bathe in natural hot springs (if you have them available), but this seems to be based on the incorrect belief that hot springs were heated by the sun (not by geothermal sources). A note in The Schottenstein Edition indicates that the Sages are enjoined from issuing a decree that the masses are unable to obey.

In some of our stories of Rabbis in bathhouses, we hear of an older sage instructing a younger disciple in a correct way of doing something on Shabbat. We have to be careful of how we phrase these conversations because we learn that we cannot discuss Torah matters in the bathhouse or the toilet. We can however prevent a transgression, like warming water on Shabbat, by discussing such matters in the proper way in a bathhouse (and presumably a toilet).

We then get an interesting discussion of leaving a container of water or oil in front of a fire on Shabbat. While we are allowed to do so to “take the chill off”, we are not allowed to place it so that “it gets heated to the degree the hand recoils from it”. A very fine distinction, indeed.