Did Hand-Washing Come Before God?

There's an article I'd very much like to re-write, discussing the psychological comparision between unethical acts and becoming physically clean. It's not that I have a problem with the study itself as that I want to present the results from a completely different angle. Such as something I could easily have turned in as an assignment for one of my theology classes. Or perhaps a psychology class, though I imagine any of the psychology professors I ever had (no, not true; I audited a class at the International Theological Institute for most of a semester) would have thrown it straight out the window and me along with it. That's what I get for spending three years taking multiple theology classes every semester; the desire to take an article about a hand-washing study and re-write it to point out all the hand-washing rituals in the Old Testament, complete with a discussion about why we had and still have certain means of "cleaning up" before God, whether physically or spiritually, why that's needed, and why it makes complete sense that a person would feel spiritually clean after physically washing up. And include a discussion of the Sacraments (such as, maybe, baptism) to show a very definite way in which God uses human things to show higher things.

Since I'm all out of classes and not likely to take another formal theology course (I'll have to keep the psychology classes in mind though), instead I'm writing down the "notes" that would otherwise have been in my head and from which I would have written the article, though by the time I'm done rewritting all this, it's actually a short paper unless I do a lot of editing. Such is life. Perhaps someone else will need to write this paper for class some day, and if so, the article mentions a nice study you can go look up and reference. Because this post doesn't warrent looking up the actual study myself.