The Pharisees’ traditions of the elders had no explicit scriptural basis. The tradition developed to fill in the gaps and silences in the regulations found in Scripture. Furstenburg describes the rules related to ritual contamination as a “tricky issue”: “Impurity can flow from one object to another, from food to body and then again to other food, and it can pass through many stages before dying out.”96 The tradition of the elders mapped out purity boundaries that enabled one to classify when impurity