The Body in Qumran Literature: Flesh and Spirit, Purity and Impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the concept of the body within a wide range of Qumran literature. In a comparison with the biblical tradition, which does not evince a consistent and systematic idea of the body, this article demonstrates that the sectarians developed their own somatic model. The sectarian model, as revealed through a close reading of such texts as Hodayot, 1QS, 1QSa, CD and 1QM, is one that repeatedly emphasized the body as a corporate entity comprised jointly of flesh and spirit. This article then reexamines the same Qumran texts to show that this concept of the body explains the extreme focus on purity at Qumran, particularly the sectarian conflation of moral and ritual purification. A final comparison with Philo, who espoused a dualistic model of the body, underscores just how truly unique the sectarian view of the body and purity was among early Jews.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".