Halál Qumránban
Death at Qumran

The question of death and burial at Qumran

Summary/Abstract: The question of death and burial at Qumran has been a subject of debates already since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Normally, we could study this practice based on the archaeological data and on the written sources. In this paper we can see, that in the case of Qumran it is not so easy. The cemetery found next to the site of Khirbet Qumran has been excavated only in a very small part, and even this is not properly documented. On the one hand, the known scrolls hardly speak about everyday practices, such as birth or death, but on the other they have strict rules about purity – rules relating the corpse, as the highest source of impurity. Furthermore, we can study possible parallels of burial practices at Qumran, both in the field of archaeology and written sources. Within the framework of this paper my aim is not to solve the problem of “Death at Qumran”, but rather to give an insight into the problem and the method of investigation.

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