The Evolution of Purity at Qumran

Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism Edited by Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 CONTENTS List of Illustrations .......................................................................................... Preface ................................................................................................................ Abbreviations ................................................................................................... List of Contributors ........................................................................................ vii ix xi xiii Introduction ..................................................................................................... Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan 1 Purity in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Paleo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian Periods ................................................................................ Michaël Guichard and Lionel Marti 47 Conceptions of Purity in Egyptian Religion ........................................... Joachim Friedrich Quack 115 Concepts of Purity in Anatolian Religions .............................................. Manfred Hutter 159 Aspects of Purity in the Phoenician World ............................................ Hans-Peter Mathys 175 Purity and Pollution in Ancient Zoroastrianism ................................... Albert F. de Jong 183 The Concept of Purity in Greek Sacred Laws ........................................ Noel Robertson 195 Concepts of Purity in Ancient Greece, with Particular Emphasis on Sacred Sites ............................................................................................ Linda-Marie Günther 245 Greek and Comparatist Reflexions on Food Prohibitions ................. Philippe Borgeaud 261 Sacral Purity and Social Order in Ancient Rome .................................. Bernhard Linke 289 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 vi contents Forms and Functions of Purity in Leviticus ........................................... Christophe Nihan 311 Purity Conceptions in the Book of Numbers in Context ................... Christian Frevel 369 Purity Conceptions in Deuteronomy ........................................................ Udo Rüterswörden 413 The System of Holiness in Ezekiel’s Vision of the New Temple (Ezek 40–48) ................................................................................................ Michael Konkel 429 The Relevance of Purity in Second Temple Judaism according to Ezra-Nehemiah ........................................................................................... Benedikt Rausche 457 Purity Concepts in Jewish Traditions of the Hellenistic Period ....... Beate Ego 477 The Evolution of Purity at Qumran .......................................................... Ian Werrett 493 Purity Conceptions in the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘Ritual-Physical’ and ‘Moral’ Purity in a Diachronic Perspective ........................................ Gudrun Holtz 519 Pure Stone: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Purity Practices in Late Second Temple Judaism (Miqwa’ot and Stone Vessels) ...... Jürgen K. Zangenberg 537 Index of Modern Authors ............................................................................. Index of Sources .............................................................................................. Index of Subjects and Terms ....................................................................... 573 577 595 © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 THE EVOLUTION OF PURITY AT QUMRAN Ian Werrett Abstract From the earliest days of Qumran scholarship down to the present, it has been repeatedly observed that the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit an intense interest in the concept of purity and the religious laws of Second Temple Judaism. This preoccupation with purity and the Jewish temple cult has been understood by modern scholars as one of the defining features of the scrolls and as a possible key to unlocking the identity of those who may have been responsible for their authorship. As one might expect, the task of transcribing and translating the nine hundred or so documents that were recovered from the region in and around the ancient site of Khirbet Qumran has been a slow and laborious project, but with the publication of each new document the portrait of the community behind the scrolls has come into sharper relief. Now that the entire corpus of texts has been published and is available for inspection, it is possible to chart both the evolution of scholarly thought on the concept of purity at Qumran and the evolving perspectives on purity that are exhibited by the scrolls themselves. Introduction If Second Temple Judaism can be described as a system of myths, rituals and sacrifices that enabled the Jewish people to understand and maintain a relationship with their God, then purity is the state of being that made that relationship possible. According to the Torah, God’s continued presence among the Israelites was contingent upon his people maintaining a level of purity that was proportional to his holiness (Lev 19:2; Deut 23:14). Although Jews were expected to maintain a moderate level of purity wherever they resided, the purity rulings that were incumbent upon all Jews during the Second Temple period became more rigorous the closer they were to the Jerusalem temple—an enormous complex of buildings and precincts that were sanctified by God’s indwelling presence (Lev 21:23). The purity of this temple was safeguarded by massive walls of stone and gates that divided the complex into a series of increasingly stringent zones of purity. The outermost of these zones, commonly known as the Court of the Gentiles, was open to Jew and non-Jew alike. By contrast, the inner precincts of the complex (i.e., the Court of the Women, the © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 494 ian werrett Court of the Israelites and the Court of the Priests) were restricted to clean Jewish women, clean Jewish men and priests who were free from impurity (Josephus, Bellum judaicum 5). Entry into the temple’s inner sanctum, or Holy of Holies, was limited to the High Priest and only then on the Day of Atonement (Lev 16). By enclosing the sanctuary within these increasingly circumscribed zones of purity, the theological architects of the Second Temple period (read ‘priests and scribes’) were attempting to create a ritually pure space in which to perform the sacrifices and rites that were deemed vital to maintaining the Jewish people’s relationship with God. Generally speaking, the concept of impurity in the Hebrew Bible can be divided into two subcategories: moral and ritual. Although these terms are problematic and do not explicitly appear in the Scriptures, they nevertheless describe two distinct states of existence.1 On the one hand, moral impurity is a lengthy if not permanent condition that is the consequence of avoidable or sinful acts, such as illicit sexual behavior (Lev 18; 20:10–26), murder (Num 35:33–34) and idolatry (Lev 19:4; 20:1–5). Moral impurity cannot be transmitted through direct contact and it can only be expunged by engaging in acts of atonement or by punishing the offending individual. Ritual impurity, on the other hand, is the temporary consequence of largely unavoidable or non-sinful conditions, such as menstruation (Lev 15:19–24), lawful sexual activity (Lev 15:16–18) and the burial of corpses (Num 19). Unlike moral impurity, ritual impurity is primarily transmitted through direct contact and those who have been rendered ritually impure are to be cleansed through a variety of lustrations, probationary periods and/or sacrifices. For the purposes of our discussion below, it is important to note that both of these forms of impurity, if left unchecked, had the potential to defile the temple and damage the relationship between God and his people, albeit in different ways.2 1 For a detailed discussion on the biblical distinction between ritual and moral impurity, see Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 21–42. 2 Whereas ritual impurity temporarily defiles people, objects and the temple through direct contact, moral impurity defiles the land, the non-repentant, and renders the Sanctuary impure from afar. Despite these differences, however, it must be said that the categories of ritual and moral impurity, as defined by Jonathan Klawans and others, are not as distinct as they would have us believe. For example, in contrast to ritual purity, which results in temporary defilement and can be expiated through various acts such as bathing and sacrifices, Klawans argues that moral impurity results in a “long-standing, if not permanent, degradation of the sinner” that is without a rite of purification. But this is not entirely accurate. As Milgrom has rightly noted, the scapegoat rite on the Day of Atonement © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 495 1. Purity and the Authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls Even before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, several theories had already been forwarded regarding the identity of those who may have been responsible for authoring the ancient text known as the Damascus Document. Recovered at the end of the nineteenth century in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo, the Damascus Document and its contents were first published in 1910 by the eminent Talmud scholar Solomon Schechter.3 Focusing almost exclusively on the legal and purity rulings contained in this document, Schechter hypothesized that the authors were a community of Zadokite priests from the Second Temple period whose practices paralleled those of the Samaritan sect known as the Dositheans. Shortly after the appearance of Schechter’s volume, Louis Ginzberg published a book entitled An Unknown Jewish Sect in which he argued that the legal positions of the Damascus Document had more in common with the Pharisees than they did with the Dositheans.4 Although Schechter and Ginzberg disagreed on the identity of the authors, the discovery of the Damascus Document at Qumran in the 1950’s would eventually confirm their contention that the text had originally been composed during the Second Temple period. Sadly, neither man would live long enough to see this hypothesis verified. In 1954, some two years before the archeological excavations at Khirbet Qumran were completed,5 Chaim Rabin theorized that the purity rulings in the Damascus Document reflected the beliefs of an ultra-pious Pharisaic group referred to in the rabbinic sources as the haburah.6 But as the contents of the scrolls started to emerge it became increasingly apparent that they contained a number of theological and legal opinions that were at (Lev 16:1–34) not only purges the Sanctuary from any defilement but it also cleanses Israel from any moral impurities. At the end of the day, all impurities, be they ritual or moral, are an affront to God who, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, is both perfect and holy (Deut 32:3–4; Ps 99:9). Any accumulation of impurity, therefore, would eventually drive God away from his abode in the Holy of Holies, thereby rendering the cult ineffective and leaving the Israelites defenseless (Deut 23:14). Although I will treat the concepts of ritual and moral impurity as distinct categories throughout the course of this discussion, it must be stated from the outset that the terms ‘ritual’ and ‘moral’ are problematic and cannot easily be disentangled from one another. See Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 26; Milgrom, “Israel’s Sanctuary”, 390–99. 3 Schechter, Documents of Jewish Sectaries. 4 Ginzberg, Unknown Jewish Sect. 5 de Vaux, Archaeology, vii–ix. 6 Rabin, The Zadokite Documents. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 496 ian werrett odds with the descriptions of the Pharisees in the Greek, Christian and rabbinic sources.7 It was precisely these differences that prompted Eleazar Sukenik to identify the scrolls, and the purity rulings contained therein, as belonging to a group known as the Essenes,8 a sect of pious Jews who are described in some detail by the ancient historians Josephus9 and Philo of Alexandria10 and identified by Pliny the Elder11 as living along the western shore of the Dead Sea during the Second Temple period. In the sixty or so years since Sukenik first posited a connection between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essenes, a wide range of theories have been forwarded concerning the identity of those who may have been responsible for authoring and collecting these ancient documents.12 Despite numerous efforts to dislodge Sukenik’s theory from its lofty perch as the consensus position within the scholarly guild, the Qumran/Essene hypothesis continues to be the most plausible explanation for the relationship between the archeological and textual evidence thus far recovered from Qumran.13 7 Two of the most frequently cited disagreements involve a difference of opinion regarding the tebul yom and the Red Heifer rite. In contrast to the Pharisaic opinion on the tebul yom, which permitted those who had completed their purification rituals, but had not waited until sunset, to participate in society as if they had been cleansed (m. Parah 3:7), the scrolls unanimously state that the purifying individual must wait until evening to be cleansed (4Q269 8 ii 3b–6; 4Q394 3–7 i 16–19; 11Q19 49:20–21). As for the Red Heifer rite, the scrolls prohibit children from functioning as sprinklers of the @>P FN (4Q269 8 ii 6), whereas the Pharisees were known to have used children as sprinklers in order to avoid some of the impurities of adulthood, such as the defilement that would result from bodily discharges and sexual activity (m. Parah 3:1–2). 8 Sukenik, Megillot Genuzot. 9 Josephus, Bellum judaicum 2.119–61; Josephus, Antiquitates judaicae 13.171–73; 18.18–22. 10 Philo, Quod omnis probus liber sit 75–91. 11 Pliny, Naturalis historia 5.17, 4 [73]. 12 For a Sadducean identification, see Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. For the Jerusalem origins hypothesis, see Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? For the interpretation of Qumran as a pottery factory, see Magen and Peleg, “The Qumran Excavations”. For the interpretation of Qumran as an agricultural fort, see Hirschfeld, Qumran in Context. For the interpretation of Qumran as a villa rustica, or manor home, of a wealthy Jewish family, see Donceel and Donceel-Voûte, “The Archaeology of Khirbet Qumran”, 1–38. And for a Christian identification, see Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus. 13 Although the term ‘Essene’ is nowhere mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its etymology is uncertain, the geographical descriptions of Pliny the Elder, when read in light of the archeological evidence from Qumran and the thirty or so parallels that have been observed between the Community Rule (1QS) and Josephus’ descriptions of the Essenes, support the notion that the Qumran community is to be identified with the Essenes. For more on the Qumran/Essene hypothesis, see VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 75–98; de Vaux, Archaeology; Magness, The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls; Metso, The Serekh Texts. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 497 2. The Concept of Purity at Qumran: 1947–1990 In 1959, Józef Milik, the noted biblical scholar and original member of the Dead Sea Scrolls’ translation team, published a survey on the texts from Qumran in which he asserted that a number of the scrolls from Cave 4 appeared to be “obsessed with questions of ritual purity”.14 Little did Milik know when he wrote these words, however, that the documents to which he was referring would remain unpublished and largely unavailable for inspection for the better part of the next forty years.15 It goes without saying that the unavailability of such texts as the Temple Scroll from Cave 11 and 4QMMT would prove to be a major stumbling block to those who were attempting to locate and understand the concept of purity in the scrolls.16 In spite of these difficulties, a handful of scholars were, from very early on, able to identify one of the most compelling and important articulations of purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls: a tendency to associate moral impurity with ritual impurity. To the best of my knowledge, David Flusser was the first scholar to explicitly comment on the association between ritual and moral purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls.17 In comparing the concept of Christian baptism with the lustrations of the Qumran community, Flusser notes: . . . purity, according to John the Baptist, is not obtainable without the previous ‘cleansing of the soul’, i.e. repentance. This idea, that moral purity is a necessary condition for ritual purity, is emphatically preached in DSD [i.e. 1QS].18 Although Flusser stops short of saying that ritual and moral impurity have been combined into a single conception of defilement, the similarities he observed between the lustrations of Qumran and those of John the Baptist have added to our understanding of Christian baptism and its development from earlier Jewish practices.19 14 Milik, Ten Years of Discovery, 41. 15 Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4. XIII; Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4. XXV. 16 The Temple Scroll, a document from Qumran containing a lengthy collection of laws relating to the temple and ritual purity, was not published in English until 1983. Similarly, the document known as 4QMMT did not find its way into publication until 1994. See Yadin, The Temple Scroll, trans. of Megillat ham-Miqdas; Qimron and Strugnell, Qumran Cave 4. V. Miqsat Ma’ase Ha-Torah. 17 Flusser, “The Dead Sea Sect”, 215–66. 18 Flusser, “The Dead Sea Sect”, 243. 19 William Brownlee and James Robinson preceded Flusser in noting a connection between John’s baptism, the lustrations of Qumran and the remission of sins; however, neither Brownlee nor Robinson used the terms ‘moral purity’ and ‘ritual purity’ when © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 498 ian werrett The writings of Helmer Ringgren represent the next stage of development in the scholarly guild on the association between ritual and moral impurity in the scrolls. Building upon the work of Hans Huppenbauer,20 Ringgren observes that, for the Qumran community, sinful behavior was metaphorically related to the concept of ritual impurity: “Since sin is often taken as defilement or impurity [in the scrolls], deliverance from sin is described correspondingly as cleansing”.21 Although he refrains from commenting on how it is that this articulation of purity deviates from the biblical model, Ringgren does offer some preliminary thoughts on the relationship between ritual and moral impurity in the scrolls: The relationship between ritual and moral purity is clarified in the upper half of the third column of the Manual of Discipline [1QS]: one cannot be had without the other. He who does not abandon sin but walks in the hardness of heart will not be cleansed through atonement or be made pure through water. He who wishes to do penance will be sprinkled with water of purification and God will lead him in the right way.22 What is missing in Ringgren’s discussion, however, is a detailed description of the association between ritual and moral impurity and how it is that this relationship would have manifested itself within the Qumran community. Whereas the language of 1QS appears to indicate that sinful activity contaminates individuals on both a moral and a ritual level, thereby necessitating acts of atonement and purification (1QS 3:3b–9a; 4:20b–22a; 5:13b–14a), Ringgren fails to explain whether these expressions are real or metaphorical. This lack of specificity is most clearly evidenced by Ringgren’s frequent use of similes: “sin is often taken as defilement or impurity”; “deliverance from sin is described correspondingly as cleansing”; and “cleansing is often described with expressions which are taken from the language of ritual. . . . [T]his was also true of sin as impurity” [italics mine].23 Complicating matters even further is the fact that Ringgren has elsewhere described the biblical articulation of moral impurity as having a ‘figurative meaning’,24 which would seem to suggest that he describing the practices of the Qumran community. See, Brownlee, “A Comparison of the Covenanters of the Dead Sea Scrolls with Pre-Christian Jewish Sects”, 49–72; Robinson, “The Baptism of John”, 175–91. 20 Huppenbauer, “THR and THRH”, 350–51. 21 Ringgren, The Faith of Qumran, 123–24. 22 Ringgren, The Faith of Qumran, 124. 23 Ringgren, The Faith of Qumran, 123–24. 24 Ringgren, “¥@E”, 291–95. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 499 understood the relationship between ritual and moral impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls as a metaphor for uncleanness. In his groundbreaking book The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism,25 Jacob Neusner echoes Ringgren’s belief that the biblical articulation of moral impurity is largely metaphorical. Where he deviates from his predecessor, however, is on the relationship between ritual and moral impurity at Qumran. Unlike Ringgren, who appears to have interpreted this association as a figurative construct, Neusner sees it as a very real state of affairs: The yahad’s laws treat committing a sin not as a metaphor for becoming unclean, but as an actual source of uncleanness. If one transgresses any part of the law, he is excluded from the ‘Purity’ of the sect. It is not as if he were unclean, as with the biblical metaphor. He is actually unclean and requires a rite of purification. So the uncleanness is not metaphorical but is treated as equivalent to the impurity imparted by a corpse or a menstrual woman.26 The litmus test for this interpretation, according to Neusner, concerns the so-called ‘purity’ of the community. As many scholars have noted, the term @Y@E@ or ‘the purity’ appears quite frequently in the Community Rule (1QS 6:22; 7:25; 8:24) and was employed by the authors of 1QS to describe the pure foodstuffs, pure liquids and/or pure objects that were considered to be off-limits to all but the members of the Qumran community. In order to gain access to the [>BX@ F[P: ¥Y@E “purity of the holy men” (1QS 5:13; 8:17) and the LF<Y@ ¥Y@E “purity of the many” (1QS 6:16–17, 25; 7:3, 16, 19), individuals first had to be cleansed of their moral and ritual impurities by submitting themselves to the authority of the community and its teachings: Ceremonies of atonement cannot restore his innocence, neither cultic waters his purity. He cannot be sanctified by baptism in oceans and rivers, nor purified by mere ritual bathing. Unclean, unclean shall he be all the days that he rejects the laws of God, refusing to be disciplined in the Yahad of His society. For only through the spirit pervading God’s true society can there be atonement for a man’s ways, all of his iniquities; thus only can he gaze upon the light of life and so be joined to His truth by His holy spirit, purified from all iniquity. Through an upright and humble attitude his sin may be covered, and by humbling himself before all God’s laws his flesh can be made clean. (1QS 3:4b–9a) 25 Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism. 26 Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism, 54. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 500 ian werrett Given that the purities of the community were only accessible to those who had attained full membership within the yahad, a status which required individuals to atone for their sins and participate in various cleansings, probationary periods and examinations by the leading members of the group, Neuser’s contention that the Qumran community understood moral impurity as being ‘an actual source of uncleanness’ is well taken. “What makes this view of purity other than metaphorical”, claims Neusner, . . . is the provision of both a specific disability consequent on sin-impurity and a rite of purification—whatever it may be . . . [the initiate] is really impure and requires cleansing from impurity before he may have contact with the pure objects of the community.27 This understanding of moral impurity is markedly different from a metaphorical articulation and it represents a major shift in thinking on the concept of purity within ancient Judaism. A second innovation at Qumran, argues Neusner, was the belief that the locus of purity in ancient Israel had been moved from the temple in Jerusalem to the members of the Qumran community. This is evidenced not only by the Damascus Document’s insistence that the temple had been rendered impure (CD 5:6b–15a; 20:22b–24), but also by the witness of 1QS, which privileges the purity, behavior and prayers of the Qumran community over and above the sacerdotal activities of the temple cult (1QS 9:3–6). Based upon these observations and on the work of Bertil Gärtner, who was one of the first scholars to articulate the notion that the Qumran community understood itself as being a temporary replacement for the sanctuary in Jerusalem,28 Neusner argues that the theologians of the yahad intentionally shifted the location of the axis mundi from the defiled temple in Jerusalem to the L>: [>XN, or “sanctuary of men”, at Qumran (4Q174 1–2 1 6). “In some measure”, writes Neuser, “this represents a ‘spiritualization’ of the old Temple, for the Temple now is the community, and the Temple worship is effected through the community’s study and fulfillment of the Torah”.29 Although these observations represent a significant stage of development within the field of Qumran research, Neusner fails to elaborate on what is arguably the most important question to come out of his study, namely: What is the nature of the relationship between Qumran’s innovations on purity and their self-understanding as the axis mundi? 27 Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism, 54. 28 Gärtner, The Temple and the Community, 4–46. 29 Neusner, The Idea of Purity, 50. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 501 In The Concept of Purity at Qumran and in the Letters of Paul,30 Michael Newton attempts to answer the question posed by Neusner’s study by dividing the relevant material from the scrolls into three areas of concern: entry into the community, life within the community and exclusion from the community. According to Newton, the key to understanding the purity innovations recorded in the scrolls is the sacerdotal nature of its congregation: [They] were a priestly community and as such had to be protected from any intrusion of uncleanness either from without, in the form of unconverted Israelites, or from within, in the form of the sinful member who either temporarily or permanently is tainted with impurity and has to separate himself from the membership.31 In other words, the Qumran community’s obsession with purity and their desire to combine ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement was an attempt to protect their priestly congregation from all forms of uncleanness. But the question remains: If the priests of the Qumran community had removed themselves from the temple cult in Jerusalem in order to live in isolation along the shores of the Dead Sea, why would they need to maintain a level of purity that was reserved for those who were officiating in the temple? In response to this question, Newton argues that the community “took these measures because it saw itself as the Temple, ‘a house of holiness for Israel and a foundation of the Holy of Holies for Aaron’ (1QS 8:5, 6), and as such had to maintain itself in a pure condition in order to guarantee the divine presence”.32 For Newton, the yahad’s obsession with purity is grounded in the belief that God had abandoned the temple in Jerusalem and taken up residence with the members of the Qumran community along the shores of the Dead Sea. As a ‘sanctuary of men’, the community believed that it was their responsibility to maintain a high enough level of purity so as to ensure God’s continued presence in their midst. It was precisely this burden, argues Newton, that was behind the community’s decision to combine ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement, a conception that, from the perspective of its architects, prevented God from being exposed to any and all forms of impurity. 30 Newton, The Concept of Purity. 31 Newton, The Concept of Purity, 18–19. 32 Newton, The Concept of Purity, 42–43. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 502 ian werrett 3. The Concept of Purity at Qumran: 1991–2010 Although many scholars have described the release of the scrolls to the general public in the fall of 1991 as a watershed moment of tremendous importance, which it was, the truth of the matter is that this was but one of many important developments to occur in the field of Qumran studies at the end of the twentieth century.33 One such moment, which has gone largely unnoticed, was the appearance in 1993 of two publications that would set the stage for all subsequent studies on the concept of purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls: a groundbreaking monograph by Hannah Harrington, entitled The Impurity Systems of Qumran and the Rabbis,34 and a seminal article by Florentino García Martínez, entitled “The Problem of Purity: The Qumran Solution”.35 Regarding the title of García Martínez’s article, it is important to recognize that the ‘problem’ to which he is referring is related, in part, to the defilement of the temple that occurred during the Antiochene crisis (2 Macc 6:1–11). In the wake of this traumatic event, and the subsequent cleansing and re-dedication of the sanctuary by Judas Maccabaeus in 164 bce, the Jerusalem temple and its maintenance became an increasingly controversial subject. Even before Antiochus Epiphanes had defiled the Sanctuary through the installation of an altar to Zeus in the year 167 bce, differences of opinion regarding the problem of purity had resulted in the 33 The release of the scrolls to the general public was initially instigated by Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, Jr., whose publication, entitled A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts from Cave Four, appeared on the 4th of September 1991. Eighteen days later, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California published an announcement that appeared in the New York Times stating that it would be willing to release microfilm copies of the scrolls to any scholar who asked for them. Responding to these unauthorized publications, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the body responsible for the official publication of the scrolls, tentatively agreed to make all of the photographs of the scrolls available on the 27th of October 1991; however, the IAA’s publication, The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche, would not appear until 1993. The final blow to the IAA’s so-called ‘monopoly’ on the Dead Sea Scrolls came on the 19th of November 1991, when the Biblical Archaeology Society published a two-volume set of photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls, entitled A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. For more on the controversy regarding the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Shanks, “Of Caves and Scholars”, xv–xxxviii. And concerning the availability of the scroll corpus, see Eisenman and Robinson, A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Tov and Pfann, The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche; Lim and Alexander, The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library; García Martínez and Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition; Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library. 34 Harrington, The Impurity Systems. 35 García Martínez, “The Problem of Purity”. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 503 formation of the major Jewish sects: the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. According to García Martínez, subsequent disagreements between these sects would eventually lead to the creation of various subgroups and the Dead Sea Scrolls bear witness to the emergence of one such movement.36 García Martínez argues that the nascent Qumran community, as a subgroup within the Essene sect, would have originally understood the purity requirements of the Torah as being reserved for the temple and the priesthood. However, in the documents that have been dated to the community’s formative period, such as the Temple Scroll and 4QMMT, García Martínez notes that “there is already a tendency to extend the requirements of Temple purity to the whole holy city [of Jerusalem]”.37 This same tendency, claims García Martínez, is also exhibited in the yahad’s decision to enlarge the scope of the priestly purity rulings so as to include all Jews, as when the Temple Scroll prohibits the blind from entering the ‘Temple City’ (11QT 45:12–13). By barring the blind and unclean individuals from the city of Jerusalem, the nascent Qumran community was attempting to hold lay individuals to the same level of purity that was expected of priests who were officiating in the temple (Lev 21:17–20). Not surprisingly, the yahad’s zeal for expanding the purity laws of the Torah to the entire city of Jerusalem and to all Jews was not shared by many of their contemporaries. According to García Martínez, when the nascent Qumran community failed to convince the temple priests to adopt a similar stance on the problem of purity, they broke ties with the Jerusalem cult and retired into the wilderness of the Judaean Desert (1QS 8:14; 4QMMT C7). During this period of self-imposed exile, the Qumran community’s halakhic interpretations became increasingly rigorous. This is most clearly evidenced, argues García Martínez, in the documents from the community’s latter stages of development, such as the Damascus Document and 1QS, which repeatedly indicate that the purity of the yahad takes precedence over the Jerusalem temple and its priestly custodians. Moreover, as we have noted above, 1QS even goes so far as to suggest that the yahad was functioning as a temporary replacement for the temple: When, united by all these precepts, such men as these come to be a community in Israel, they shall establish eternal truth guided by the instruction of His holy spirit. They shall atone for the guilt of transgression and the rebellion of sin, becoming an acceptable sacrifice for the land through the flesh 36 García Martínez, “A Groningen Hypothesis”. 37 García Martínez, “The Problem of Purity”, 157. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 504 ian werrett of burnt offerings, the fat of sacrificial portions and prayer, becoming—as it were—justice itself, a sweet savor of righteousness and blameless behavior, a pleasing free-will offering. At that time the men of the Yahad shall withdraw, the holy house of Aaron uniting as a Holy of Holies . . . (1QS 9:3–9) Like Neusner and Newton before him, García Martínez agrees that the Qumran community saw themselves as a temporary replacement for the temple in Jerusalem. Similarly, García Martínez concurs with the notion that the yahad deviated from the biblical tradition by combining ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement. What differentiates García Martínez’s study from those of his predecessors, however, is the way that he arrives at these conclusions. Whereas Neuser and Newton were apt to interpret the purity rulings of the scrolls through a synchronic lens that tends to see the texts from Qumran as being reflective a single moment in time, García Martínez embraces a diachronic approach that understands the Dead Sea Scrolls as bearing witness to a lengthy period of development. By reading the scrolls diachronically, García Martínez claims to have identified an evolution of thought on the concept of purity that was largely in line with the biblical model during the yahad’s formative years but that became increasingly stringent as the group tried to differentiate itself from the temple establishment and their contemporaries. In reading these documents diachronically, García Martínez is also able to suggest a possible connection between the larger historical narrative of the Second Temple period and the scrolls by claiming that the Antiochene crisis and the subsequent installation of the Hasmonean High Priests may have been the impetus behind the Qumran community’s decision to break its ties with the temple cult and relocate along the shores of the Dead Sea.38 In contrast to García Martínez, who interprets the purity rulings of the scrolls in light of the larger historical setting in which they were written, Hannah Harrington’s goal in The Impurity Systems of Qumran and the Rabbis is far more specific: to reconstruct the purity system of the yahad and to compare it with that of the Mishnah. In order to accomplish this task Harrington adopts a synchronic approach and limits her discussion to the laws of ritual purity. Furthermore, she rejects the notion, espoused by García Martínez and Newton, that the yahad could have constructed a surrogate temple at Qumran, be it real or metaphorical: 38 García Martínez, “A Groningen Hypothesis”, 126–28. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 505 The sectarians of Qumran regarded themselves as living, not in the sacred status of the Temple of the present or of the future but in the pure status incumbent by the Torah, according to their interpretation, on ordinary Israelites. They believed that in the eschaton there would be a re-established Temple at Jerusalem with an accompanying cult, however, it was impossible to reconstruct a surrogate Temple at Qumran.39 As proof of this interpretation, Harrington cites the absence of an altar at Qumran and various discrepancies between the legal rulings of the scrolls and the archeological remains from Qumran. In particular, she points to the presence of female skeletons in the Qumran cemetery and the existence of marital regulations in the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence that the members of the yahad were sexually active and did not use the Temple Scroll—a document that prohibits female residents and sexual activity in the ‘Temple City’ (11QT 45:11–12)40—as a blueprint for recreating a surrogate ‘Temple City’ at Qumran. Rather, argues Harrington, the community was committed to the idea that they should study the laws of the Temple Scroll in order to prepare for a future date when the temple would be restored. In this way, observes Harrington, the situation of the Qumran community was not terribly dissimilar from that of the Rabbis who, after the destruction of the temple in 70 ce, continued to study and discuss the Torah’s sacrificial system in the hopes of seeing its eventual restoration. Although Harrington’s unwillingness to accept the surrogate temple theory represents a serious departure from her predecessors, her most significant contribution to the field of Qumran studies involves her identification of the dominant hermeneutical trends in the writings of the yahad and the Rabbis: Stark differences in interpretation between the two groups often co-exist. The sectarians usually increase the stringency of the [biblical] laws in cases of ambiguity or divergent traditions. On the other hand, it was the continual concern of the Rabbis to limit not extend the restrictions of the Torah whenever possible without incursion of biblical sanctions.41 Unlike the Rabbis, who attempted to interpret Scripture in such a way as to limit the force of the Torah’s restrictions on the laity, Harrington notes 39 Harrington, The Impurity Systems, 56–57. 40 According to Yigael Yadin, the references in the Temple Scroll to quarantining menstruants and postpartum women from every city (11QT 48:16–17a), which are absent in the rules of quarantine for Jerusalem (11QT 46:16b–18), may well suggest that women were not allowed to live in the ‘Temple City’; Yadin, The Temple Scroll, 1:306–07. 41 Harrington, The Impurity Systems, 43. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 506 ian werrett that the Qumran community repeatedly interpreted Scripture with an eye towards severity. This predilection for stringency, argues Harrington, was an outgrowth of the community’s concerns regarding the accidental violation of the Torah’s legislation. By embracing a stringent hermeneutical model, the members of the Qumran community had hoped to protect themselves from any and all transgressions of Scripture, no matter how small. Unfortunately, this model was far too conservative for the vast majority of their contemporaries and, according to Harrington, the members of the yahad had no choice but to withdraw from mainstream society in order to pursue their quest for purity in isolation along the shores of the Dead Sea. With the appearance of her 2004 publication The Purity Texts,42 Harrington attempted to update her earlier research by taking advantage of newly published documents and collecting all of the purity data from Qumran into a single volume. But despite having access to a larger body of literature, Harrington’s position on the Qumran community’s style of interpretation remained unchanged: The many purity texts found at Qumran reveal an approach to purity which is stringent. The biblical prescriptions for purity are often increased and impurity is regarded as a more potent force than it is by any other ancient Jewish group in antiquity.43 Although this conclusion is identical to that of her earlier work, and has been widely accepted by the members of the Qumran scholarly guild, Harrington’s understanding of the rationale behind the Qumran community’s stringent hermeneutical agenda is vastly different from her earlier study. Where Harrington had formerly understood the severity of the group’s legal interpretations as a scholarly pursuit that was related to the restoration of an eschatological temple, her most recent volume indicates that the Qumran community’s rigorous approach to purity was an outgrowth of the belief that the yahad had, in fact, become a temporary substitute for the temple in Jerusalem: After the break with the Temple, the community is seen as a substitute and must be protected just as the Temple was. Levels of purity in the community parallel levels of purity required in the Temple and in the holy city.44 42 Harrington, The Purity Texts. 43 Harrington, The Purity Texts, 12. 44 Harrington, The Purity Texts, 38. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 507 In contrast to her earlier work, which describes the Temple Scroll as an eschatological document that had little to no bearing on the day-to-day lives of the Qumran community, Harrington’s most recent volume claims that the yahad used the Temple Scroll as a blueprint for maintaining a surrogate sanctuary and ‘Temple City’ at Qumran. In support of this interpretation, Harrington points to a number of halakhic similarities between the Temple Scroll and the Damascus Document, such as the prohibition against engaging in sexual activity in the city of the temple (11QT 45:11–12; CD 12:1–2), and to new archeological evidence indicating that the remains of women in the Qumran cemetery were Islamic and therefore not contemporaneous with the yahad.45 These observations, and others, seem to have convinced Harrington that the Temple Scroll has far more in common with the textual and archaeological evidence from Qumran than she had previously thought, thereby minimizing some of the Temple Scroll’s seemingly unrealistic and eschatological expectations, such as its prohibitions against allowing the blind, the corpse impure, female residents and sexual activity in the ‘Temple City’ (11QT 45:7–12, 17). Before turning to my own contributions on the study of purity at Qumran, I would like to discuss what is arguably the most comprehensive analysis to date on the relationship between ritual and moral impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, by Jonathan Klawans.46 In this compelling study, Klawans embraces a diachronic approach that is not unlike that of García Martínez. Specifically, both Klawans and García Martínez argue that the Temple Scroll and 4QMMT, documents that do not combine ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement, were written during the Qumran community’s formative period. Moreover, they also agree that those texts that display a strong association between sin and impurity, such as the Damascus Document and the Community Rule, were written during the later stages of the yahad’s existence. Where Klawans deviates from García Martínez, however, is on the rationale behind the Qumran community’s shift in thinking on the subject of purity. For García Martínez, the members of the yahad left Jerusalem and relocated along the shores of the Dead Sea because they could not convince the priests in Jerusalem to significantly extend the laws of purity beyond the walls of the temple complex. After the break with the temple priests 45 Harrington, The Purity Texts, 14; 39; 50–54. 46 Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 21–42. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 508 ian werrett had taken place, the Qumran community’s position on purity became increasingly stringent and, as noted above, they eventually came to see themselves as a replacement for the sanctuary in Jerusalem. As the new temple, the Qumran community needed to protect itself from all forms of impurity and, according to García Martínez, the combination of ritual and moral impurity in the scrolls was simply an outgrowth of the community’s self-understanding as Israel’s new axis mundi. By contrast, Klawans claims that the Qumran community’s decision to combine moral and ritual impurity into a single conception of defilement may have been the issue that forced the yahad to retreat into the Judaean Desert in the first place. According to Klawans, although the Temple Scroll and 4QMMT bear witness to certain legal disputes between the nascent Qumran community and their opponents, these documents do not contain any of the distinctive features of Qumran sectarianism, such as an interest in dualism, predestination, messianic figures and angels. Given the absence of these distinctive features, Klawans claims that these documents were written during the yahad’s formative years and that the disagreements recorded in a document like 4QMMT may have led to subsequent quarrels over the relationship between ritual and moral impurity: I am not certain which came first—the interest in the defiling force of sin or the schism—but the fact remains that the defiling force of sin necessitates, justifies, and reinforces the physical separation of the sectarians from the larger Jewish polity. If you believe in the maintenance of purity, and you believe that sin and sinners are defiling, you have little choice but to remove yourself from that society that you consider to be irredeemably sinful.47 Beyond the suggestion that the Qumran community’s position on the impurity of sin may have been the motivating factor behind their decision to leave Jerusalem, Klawans offers yet another hypothesis for the community’s decision to withdraw from society: the defilement of the land.48 If, according to the Holiness Code (Lev 17–26), sin contaminates Israel and leads to an expulsion from the land, then the Qumran community may well have understood their location along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea as a form of exile (cf. 1QS 8:12–16; Isa 40:3). Although these theories are compelling and certainly worthy of consideration, Klawans’ most significant contribution to the field of Qumran studies is located in 47 Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 92. 48 Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 88–89. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 509 his detailed analysis of the ways in which ritual and moral impurity have been combined in the Dead Sea Scrolls. As Klawans has rightly observed, one of the most unusual aspects of the relationship between sin and impurity at Qumran involves the idea that sinful acts render individuals ritually impure. In contrast to the biblical witness, which treats ritual and moral impurity as separate states of existence requiring vastly different responses from those who have been affected, the Community Rule treats sins, such as deceit, blasphemy and idolatry, as ritually defiling acts (1QS 4:10–11, 21; 7:17–18). Similarly, Klawans notes that the yahad considered instances of non-sinful behavior, such as the ritual uncleanness that accompanies a woman’s menstrual cycle, to be morally defiling (4Q512 29–32 vii 8–9; cf., 4Q274 1–4; Lev 15:19–24). In both instances, the biblical articulation has been modified and expanded so as to create a far more rigorous and comprehensive approach to the concept of purity. Yet another interesting aspect of the relationship between sin and impurity at Qumran involves the purity of outsiders and insiders. According to Klawans, the Qumran community considered outsiders to be both ritually and morally unclean due to their ignorance regarding the proper interpretation of the Torah and their unwillingness to be “disciplined by the Yahad of His society” (1QS 3:6). Regardless of social status or race, outsiders were permanently defiled and prohibited from touching the Qumran community’s pure objects and pure foodstuffs (1QS 3:4b–9a). In order to be cleansed the outsider must become an insider, but even insiders were not immune to the defiling effects of sinful behavior: No man belonging to the Covenant of the Community who flagrantly deviates from any commandment is to touch the pure food belonging to the holy men. Further, he is not to participate in any of their deliberations until all his works have been cleansed from evil, so that he is again able to walk blamelessly . . . (1QS 8:16–18) In order to regain his status as a fully functioning member of the community, the insider must be cleansed from all of his defilements. Only through the combination of asking for repentance and engaging in the community’s expiatory rites could the defiled insider hope to be cleansed (1QS 3:6–9). “According to the sectarians”, notes Klawans, “moral repentance is not efficacious without ritual purification, and ritual purification without moral repentance is equally invalid”.49 One cannot be had 49 Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 85. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 510 ian werrett without the other and the sinful insider was required to engage in both before being cleansed. An exception to this rule, however, involves the outsider who was first expected to submit himself to the authority of the Qumran community. Given that the lustrations of the community’s opponents were thought to be unclean and ineffective, outsiders would, in the opinion of the yahad, remain ritually and morally unclean for as long as they refused to join the ranks of the Qumran community. My own contributions to the study of purity at Qumran involve a complete reassessment of the purity rulings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a 2007 publication, entitled Ritual Purity and the Dead Sea Scrolls,50 I conducted the first comprehensive analysis of the ritual purity rulings in the scrolls since the full publication of the legal material from Qumran.51 By adopting an independent approach that treated each of the documents from Qumran as a unique composition with its own agenda and point of view, I had hoped to avoid, as much as humanly possible, reading the texts in light of one another. Only after treating each of the documents in isolation and allowing them to speak with their own voices did I then compare my findings. Towards the end of my study I further limited my focus by examining those rulings that displayed explicit agreement and/or explicit disagreement that went beyond the witness of Scripture.52 By identifying examples such as these, I had hoped to locate compelling points of contact that were worthy of further discussion. At the conclusion of my study I was able to identify nine examples of explicit agreement and eight examples of explicit disagreement that went beyond the witness of Scripture.53 Of the nine cases of explicit agreement, six involve a consensus on the intricacies of corpse impurity, while the remaining three are concerned with bodily discharges (2×) and sexual 50 Werrett, Ritual Purity. 51 The documents from Qumran that were considered in my study include: the Damascus Document (CD/DD); 4Q159; 4Q249; 4Q251; 4Q265; 4Q274–278; 4Q284; 4QMMT (4Q394–399); 4Q414; 4Q472a; 4Q512–514; and the Temple Scroll (11Q19). 1QS, 1QSa, 1QSb, 1QHabPesher and 1QH were not included in this study because they did not contain any of the five major categories of purity under consideration (i.e., diseases, animals, corpses, bodily discharges and sexual misdeeds). 52 Unlike implicit examples of agreement/disagreement, which tend to be founded upon circumstantial evidence, and examples of agreement/disagreement that are in line with the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the common property of all Jews, examples of explicit disagreement and agreement that go beyond the witness of Scripture provide us with a far more precise way to identify common interpretations and/or divergences between two or more documents, authors, redactors or groups. 53 Werrett, Ritual Purity, 288–305. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 511 misdeeds (1×).54 Similarly, of the eight examples of explicit disagreement in the scrolls, two take up the issue of corpse impurity while the remaining six are concerned with bodily discharges (4×) and sexual misdeeds (2×).55 Interestingly, no cases of explicit agreement or disagreement were discovered in the areas of diseases and animals. As one might expect, the results of my study have raised some concerns about the systemic approach and have called into question the nature of the relationships between the documents from Qumran. Moreover, the examples of explicit disagreement that I have identified, such as the lack of concord regarding those who are eligible to sprinkle the ashes of the Red Heifer,56 have challenged the prevailing notion in the scholarly guild that the “similarity of the concept and laws of purity [in the scrolls] are more striking than their differences”.57 If nothing else, the fact that nearly half of the seventeen cases of explicit agreement and disagreement 54 The cases of explicit agreement include a consensus on the following items: all objects in a house are rendered impure by the presence of a corpse (CD 12:17b–18; 11Q19 49:5–21a); the ashes of the Red Heifer may not be sprinkled on the Sabbath (4Q251 1–2 6; 4Q265 7 3; 4Q274 2 ii 2–3a); children may not act as sprinklers of the ashes (4Q269 8 ii 6; 4Q277 1 ii 7); the tebul yom is impure until evening (4Q269 8 ii 3b–6; 4Q277 1 ii 2; 4Q394 3–7 i 16b–19a; 11Q19 49:20–21; 50:4b–9, 10–16a; 50:20–51:5a); corpse-contaminated individuals must engage in a first-day ablution before being sprinkled with the ashes of the Red Heifer (4Q277 1 ii 7b–10a; 4Q414 2 ii, 3, 3 2, 13 5; 4Q512 1–6 xii 5–6; 11Q19 49:16b–21; 50:10–16a); liquids in a corpse-contaminated house transmit impurity to the first degree (CD 12:15b–17a; 11Q19 49:9–10); men with a bodily discharge must be quarantined (4Q274 1 i 0–2; 11Q19 46:16b–18; 48:14–17a); a person who has had an emission of semen transmits impurity through his touch (4Q274 1 i 8b–9; 4Q272 1 ii 3b–7a); sexual relations are prohibited in the city of the temple (CD 12:1–2a; 11Q19 45:11–12a). 55 Instances of explicit disagreement that go beyond the witness of Scripture include: a lack of concord over who is eligible to sprinkle the ashes of the Red Heifer (4Q269 8 ii 4b–6a; 4Q394 3–7 i 17–19a; 4Q277 1 ii 5b–7a); a disagreement on the proper way to go about cleansing household items that have been rendered impure by a corpse (4Q269 8 ii 3–6; 11Q19 49:16–20); differing opinions on the appropriate distance between a camp/city and its latrines (1Q33 7:6b–7; 11Q19 46:13–16a); a disagreement on whether or not a newborn child is ritually pure (4Q265 7 11–17; 4Q266 6 ii 5–12); diverging opinions on how to purify a man with a bodily discharge (4Q512 10 x 1–2, 11 x 2–5; 11Q19 45.15–17a); a disagreement on the appropriate way to purify those who have come in contact with a man who has had a bodily discharge (4Q274 1 i 5; 4Q277 1 ii 10b–13); conflicting opinions on whether or not uncle/niece unions are valid (4Q543 1 5–6 1–7; CD 5:7–11; 4Q251 17 2–3; 11Q19 66:16–17); and lack of agreement on whether or not Jew/Gentile unions are prohibited (CD 19:15–21; 4Q251 17 7; 4Q394 8 iii 9b–19a; 4Q396 1–2 iv 4–11a; 4Q513 2 ii 2–5; 11Q19 57:15b–17a; 63:10–15). 56 According to the Damascus Document and 4QMMT, the ashes of the Red Heifer (Num 19) had to be sprinkled by a clean man who had waited until evening (4Q269 8 ii 4b–6a; 4Q394 3–7 i 17–19a). By contrast, 4Q277 1 ii 5b–7a claims that the sprinkler of the ashes had to be a clean priest. 57 Harrington, The Purity Texts, 12. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 512 ian werrett are instances of disagreement shows that the similarities and differences between the purity laws in the Dead Sea Scrolls are equally compelling. Following in the footsteps of García Martínez and Klawans, I have attempted to explain the discrepancies among the purity rulings in the scrolls by embracing a diachronic approach. While this approach has enabled me to account for many of the disagreements in the scrolls, it was unable to account for them all. For example, like my colleagues, I too observed what appeared to be an evolution of thought in the scrolls on the relationship between ritual and moral impurity. And although this evolution seemed to explain the lack of concord between certain rulings, such as the disagreement in the scrolls over the proper way to purify objects from corpse contamination,58 it is also true that the Temple Scroll was frequently at odds with the rest of the texts from Qumran. Of the eight examples of explicit disagreement that I have identified, six involve a lack of agreement between the Temple Scroll and the rest of the texts from Qumran. This observation, combined with the fact that the Temple Scroll displays a number of utopian characteristics, such as its unheeded divine call to construct a gigantic temple complex that, if built, would have been equal in size to the entire city of Jerusalem (11Q19 3–13:8; 30:3–47:18), would seem to suggest that the genre and provenance of the scrolls may well have a major role to play in the ever-evolving discussion on purity at Qumran. Based on the results of my study, I have concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls fail to contain a cohesive purity system. This conclusion is also supported by the work of Klawans, who has observed that although the ideas of ritual and moral impurity have been combined into a single conception of defilement in certain documents (i.e., 1QS, 1QH, 1QM, 4Q274, 4Q277, 4Q414 and 4Q512) there is no equivalent association between these types of impurity in the Temple Scroll or 4QMMT. Given this lack of concord, I find myself in agreement with Klawans, who has suggested that “the ‘systemic’ methods advocated by some scholars—whereby a single 58 Where the Temple Scroll requires corpse-contaminated clothing, sacks and skins to be washed in water (11Q19 49:16a–20), the Damascus Document indicates that skins, clothing and utensils that have been rendered unclean by a corpse are to be sprinkled with the ashes of the Red Heifer (4Q269 8 ii 3b–6a). This deviation may well be representative of an evolution of thought on the subject of the ashes of the Red Heifer whereby its range of cleansing abilities was gradually expanded beyond that of the protosectarian document (i.e., the Temple Scroll) so as to include any items that had been rendered ritually and morally impure through a corpse. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 513 purity system is discerned in diverse Qumran texts—is to be called into question”.59 While I admit to being partial to the diachronic approach, which has been employed to good effect by the likes of García Martínez and Klawans, this approach is not without drawbacks. In particular, not only is the diachronic approach overly dependent upon the notion that there is a concrete relationship between the documents in the so-called ‘library’ of Qumran, but it cannot easily account for disagreements between two or more texts that were written during the same period of time.60 It goes without saying that there are other ways to try to explain the explicit cases of agreement and disagreement between the purity rulings in the scrolls, but these approaches have similar limitations. For example, while it is possible to use the genre and contents of a text to determine whether or not it is a Qumran composition, none of the so-called ‘sectarian texts’ are so far afield from the rest of the documents at Qumran so as to indicate that a rival sect may have authored them. Furthermore, even if the genre of a sectarian text appears to be utopian or eschatological, we cannot know with absolute certainty how the members of the yahad may have interpreted a document at all times during their nearly two hundred year history at Qumran (c. 130 bce to 68 ce). Even if the Qumran community eventually came to see themselves as a temporary replacement for the temple and applied the rules and regulations of the Temple Scroll to themselves, doing so would have conflicted with the witness of the Temple Scroll, which clearly indicates that its purity rulings were intended for the city of Jerusalem and a massive sanctuary that never saw the light of day. Another possible way to understand the differences in the purity rulings from Qumran is as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Gaps and ambiguities in Scripture can be interpreted in any number of ways and, regardless of how well defined a group’s identity is, divergent interpretations 59 Klawans, Impurity and Sin, 90–91. 60 This is particularly true in relation to the explicit disagreement in the scrolls over the purity of a newborn child (4Q265 7 11–17 and 4Q266 6 ii 10b–11). Here we have an example of two texts that exhibit different opinions on the same subject but were authored at roughly the same time, contain overlapping material and were stored in the same cave. Although Charlotte Hempel has noted that the author/redactor of 4Q265 frequently exhibits an “independent treatment” of the overlapping passages from 4Q266, as well as other manuscripts of the Damascus Document, the diachronic approach cannot easily explain these types of disagreements. Werrett, Ritual Purity, 298; Hempel, The Laws of the Damascus Document, 103. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 514 ian werrett are bound to appear. This is most certainly true of the rabbinic material, which contains countless examples of disagreements that go beyond the witness of the Hebrew Scriptures. Given that several hundred scribes were responsible for authoring and redacting the Dead Sea Scrolls, it stands to reason that some of the aforementioned disagreements reflect legitimate differences of opinion and/or unintentional scribal mistakes. It is also possible that, like the rabbis, the yahad tolerated and even encouraged a modicum of disagreement on the purity rulings and their proper interpretation. Although I find the latter proposal to be quite appealing, it would seem to be undermined by the witness of the sectarian documents, which, purity rulings aside, are overwhelmingly compatible in terms of their terminology, theology and calendrical concerns. In spite of its shortcomings, and the strengths of competing approaches, a diachronic reading of the purity rulings from Qumran is to be preferred for four reasons: (1) it enables us to explain the differences between those texts that combine ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement and those that do not; (2) it provides us with an explanation as to why it is that composite texts, such as the Damascus Document, contain sectarian and non-sectarian elements; (3) it give us a tool to reconcile cases of explicit disagreement within the corpus of texts far better than the systemic approach, which is severely undermined by any lack of agreement; and (4) it sheds light on why it is that some of the texts from Qumran seem to reflect legal positions that are in line with the biblical model, whereas others elaborate on the biblical model in the direction of severity in order to account for a wider range of possibilities. Even if I had not uncovered numerous examples of explicit disagreement in the purity rulings of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the consensus opinion regarding the yahad and its evolution from a group that initially supported the idea of the temple to one that removed itself from Jerusalem, relocated along the shores of the Dead Sea, and ultimately came to see itself as a replacement for the temple, argues against the notion that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain a cohesive purity system. The very act of changing the locus of purity from the temple in Jerusalem to the members of the yahad is reflective of a massive shift in thinking that would have had monumental repercussions on the Qumran community’s purity rulings. This evolution of thought, which would have taken several generations to complete, is reflected in the scrolls in the form of the aforementioned explicit disagreements and in the increasingly stringent approach to purity that the Qumran community seems to have embraced prior to their destruction at the hands of the Romans in 68 ce. © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 the evolution of purity at qumran 515 Conclusion The study of purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls is, in many ways, only just beginning. Although scholars have been writing on the subject of purity at Qumran since the discovery of the scrolls in late 1940’s, many of the early publications on the subject were hampered by an inability to access all of the documents in this corpus of texts. Limited access to the scrolls led many scholars to understand the vast majority of the non-biblical scrolls as having a ‘Qumranic’ origin. Moreover, scholars frequently used the purity rulings in the scrolls to identify the authors rather than using them to comment on the nature of the rulings themselves. Much has changed since the release of the scrolls to the general public in 1991, and many of the synchronic and systemic conclusions that were generated by the first generation of Qumran scholars must now be abandoned. In spite of its shortcomings, a diachronic reading of the scrolls would seem to be the most fruitful way to understand the explicit agreements and disagreements between the purity rulings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Over the course of its two hundred year history, the Qumran community seems to have moved further and further away from the temple cult in Jerusalem and, as a result, the type of Judaism that they ended up practicing became more and more insular and severe. From a diachronic perspective, the increasing stringency of the yahad’s interpretations can be explained by the Qumran community’s belief that the Sanctuary in Jerusalem had been defiled and by the fact that the members of the community had, at some point in their history, come to see themselves as being representative of a surrogate temple of flesh and blood. As the true Israel and the only legitimate Sanctuary of God, the Qumran community believed that only they had the ability to maintain an appropriate relationship with the God of Israel. This radical evolution of thought, which did not happen overnight, appears to have inspired the community to embrace a progressively severe stance on the subject of purity and to combine the concepts of ritual and moral impurity into a single conception of defilement. By combining the concepts of sin and impurity, the theologians of the Qumran community had hoped to create an environment in which the members of their group would be free from all forms of impurity so as to ensure the continued presence of God in their midst. Although the diachronic approach has enabled us to place the Qumran community into a larger historical context and to identify their evolution of thought on the relationship between sin and impurity, which is no © 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-23210-5 516 ian werrett small feat, alternative methodological approaches, such as those in the areas of literary criticism, feminist criticism, source criticism and social scientific criticism, will no doubt take us in new and exciting directions. As these alternative approaches are brought to bear on the legal material in the Dead Sea Scrolls, our understanding of the notion of purity at Qumran will continue to evolve. 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