Abstract This article foregrounds the importance of intersectionality and related approaches to our understanding of early Judaism. The first section discusses the rise of scholarly approaches that bring questions of the social world to the forefront of historical inquiry, and how the Dead Sea Scrolls have been integrated into the study of the Second Temple Jewish society. The second section introduces intersectionality and argues for the analytical benefits of reading and interpreting Jewish materials through an intersectional lens. By stressing the plurality of categories that characterise and shape the agency and experience of any human being, such a lens allows scholars to observe and examine (ancient) people and their social settings beyond a single-axis approach, with a special focus on power and its problematics. The final section discusses the case studies included in this issue which investigate both ancient texts and material objects in the light of new research paradigms.

Abstract This study advances the thesis that demonic impurity in the Book of the Watchers, Jubilees, and Qumran texts is best understood as “cosmic impurity,” distinct from ritual or moral impurity. It is characterized by its origin in cosmic boundary violation, inherent nature, irreversibility, and eschatological exclusion. This applies both to demonic beings’ own impurity and to their distinctive defiling effects on humans. The study traces these features in the Watcher myth and their reshaping through interaction with other traditions (Belial, Mastema) and dualistic theological frameworks. Employing a “meta-halakic” relationship informed by Robert Cover’s concept of nomos , it shows that these features—though not codified as halakah—are integrated into framing stories that contribute to halakic reasoning on circumcision, ritual purification, and assembly criteria in Jubilees, 1 QS , and CD , respectively. It concludes by reconsidering Jesus’s halakic dispute in Mark 7, framed by exorcism stories, as a redactional appropriation of cosmic impurity within Jewish halakic discourse rather than a gentile-church retrojection.