Laws Pertaining to Women and Sexuality in the Early Stratum of the Damascus Document

One way of gaining insight into the nature of any Jewish community is the investigation of its views on Jewish law and those Jewish legal texts composed within it. This paper will examine the wide variety of laws pertaining to women in the Dead Sea Scrolls, seeking to extract from them a sense of the nature of the society in which these laws functioned as well as the relationship of these laws to the earlier biblical corpus and the later rabbinic tradition. Among the topics to be discussed are not only those dealing with subjects such as marriage, ritual purity, and oaths and vows; we will also see how women figure in laws pertaining to such subjects as Sabbath, testimony, and even the eschatological community. In our view, it is difficult to conceive of how the Qumran legal system can possibly be understood to serve an all-male celibate society.