Purity and Impurity in the Book of Jubilees
Lutz Doering
The issue of purity and impurity in Jubilees has provoked recent debate.
While some scholars assign Jubilees and the Temple Scroll "to the same legal
and exegetical tradition"^1 and place them, together with the texts from
Qumran, within the ancient priestly halakah,^2 others perceive profound dif
ferences.^3 L. Ravid concludes from the absence of ritual defilement in the
story of Abraham's death in Jub 23:1-7 that "it does not seem probable that
the author agreed with the Pentateuchal concepts of purity and impurity, or
with those represented in the Judean Desert scrolls."^4 According to Ravid,
Jubilees is a polemic against the priesthood who then controlled the temple.
In response, J. VanderKam suggests reading Jubilees in line with the putative
setting of the book in a period without a sanctuary and indebted to the tra
ditions this book reworks.^5 My own reading of Jubilees is closer to the latter,
- Thus the classic formulation by J. C. VanderKam, "The Temple Scroll and the Book
of Jubilees," in Temple Scroll Studies, ed. G. J. Brooke, JSPSup 7 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1989),
211-36, 232. - E.g., C. Werman, "The Rules of Consuming and Covering the Blood in Priestly and
Rabbinic Law," RevQ 16, no. 64 (1995): 621-36. - E.g., J. Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); M. Himmelfarb, "Sexual Relations and Purity in the Temple Scroll and the
Book of Jubilees," DSD 6 (1999): 11-36. - L. Ravid, "Purity and Impurity in the Book of Jubilees," JSP 13 (2002): 61-86, 63.
- J. VanderKam, "Viewed from Another Angle: Purity and Impurity in the Book of
Jubilees? JSP 13 (2002): 209-15.