Endnote 4 – A Ritual Purification Center

All the textual evidence Crown and Cansdale cite for Qumran characteristics is drawn from two sources, the Temple Scroll and the Damascus Document. Though both texts are indeed foundation documents of the sect, the practices they describe are in many cases almost verbatim quotations from the Bible and can’t be considered particular “Qumran characteristics.” In general, Crown and Cansdale seem to overlook the complexity of the texts they quote as proofs. They interpret them literally, without appreciating that all the laws were probably not equally valid for all the sectarians—who probably believed and practiced at a number of levels, as most religious communities do today. See James VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 71–98; and my own Solving the Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Light on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), pp. 82–103.