Tamei is the word the whole purity system turns on, and English has no clean way to carry it. It is not "dirty," because a freshly bathed man who has touched a corpse is tamei and a filthy shepherd may not be. It is not "sinful," because bearing a child, burying your dead, and the ordinary facts of a living body all make a person tamei, and not one of them is a sin. It is a status: unfit, for this season, to come near the place where HaShem dwells.

The KJV says "unclean," the modern versions keep it, and the Western ear hears hygiene or shame, neither of which is in the Hebrew. So the reader files the purity laws under ancient superstition and misses that the word is about nearness, about who may approach and who must wait.

And tamei is never a life sentence. It is the front half of a motion whose back half is tahor. The word carries its own way out: you go down into the water tamei, and you come up tahor, cleared to draw near again. The whole drama of the mikvah lives in the gap between those two words, and the claim of this table is that the deepest tumah of all, death itself, met its answer in a grave that became the great mikvah.