The Purity Texts »

The Purity Texts is a handbook that gathers the data of the Dead Sea Scrolls on ritual purity and analyses it systematically as part of a coherent ideology. After a general introduction and an examination of individual texts for their contribution to the subject of purity, there is a chapter devoted to each of the impurities discussed in the Scrolls: death, leprosy, bodily discharges and outsiders. In each of these chapters, emphasis is placed on the great congruence between the Qumran texts on the subject of purity and the similarities and differences between these texts and other sources of ancient Judaism.