At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity among the Jews of Roman Galilee by Stuart S. Miller (review).

Miller includes ritual baths with a split staircase, which elsewhere this reviewer has identified with priests or priestly maintenance of purity, and ritual baths with an adjacent pool (o'tzar), which I have identified with the halakhah of the Pharisees ("Ritual Baths of Jewish Groups and Sects in the Second Temple Period," Cathedra 79 (1996): 3–21 and Cathedra 83 (1997): 169–76 [Hebrew]). Miller also demonstrates that Jews and Christians alike understood and appreciated the life-giving properties of water and regarded them as a divinely bestowed. In other words, the domestic environment, rather than the synagogue, was the space most affected by the spiritual properties of water.