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As Clean as Seven Waters

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Nell from Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers her great-grandfather and her grandmother using the phrase as clean as seven watersto mean “spotlessly clean.” The word waters in this case is analogous to washes or rinses, so being cleaned with seven waters suggests that something will be quite clean indeed. In the biblical book of 2 Kings, Namaan, who suffers from a dreadful disease, is told to wash seven times in the muddy Jordan River, which cures him. In many religious traditions the number seven symbolizes purity and cleanliness. This is part of a complete episode.

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