Purity Conceptions in the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘Ritual-Physical’ and ‘Moral’ Purity in a Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

In recent years, a large number of scholarly works have been published on purity issues in the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). Taking its point of departure from J. Klawans’ book Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, the present article aims to reexamine two aspects of the discussion about purity in the DSS. The first aspect is the question of the adequacy of extant diachronic models to explain the different perspectives on the relationship between ritual-physical and moral (im)purity. The second aspect concerns the question of the specific forms of the relationship between ritual-physical and moral impurity in the scrolls. In this chapter, the adequacy of the category of ‘moral’ purity for parts of the texts is problematized and a further category, namely ‘constitutional’ impurity, introduced. Keywords:constitutional purity; Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS); diachronic perspective; Klawans; purity conceptions; ritual-physical and moral purity