The Dead Sea Scrolls have brought us an enormously rich corpus of ritual texts to study. The Qumran evidence is particularly interesting for the study of ritual, since it is a collection preserved by coincidence, (mostly) not transmitted to us through centuries, and yet it preserves documents of a movement within Judaism that lasted for some generations. The “Qumran movement” signifies here the socio-religious movement whose members most probably lived in several locations in Judaea around the turn of the era and were responsible for transmitting the manuscripts that were then discovered in the Qumran caves. My interest lies in the ritual life of the Qumran movement as a whole. Such a “system” has to be reconstructed from the corpus that includes both texts deriving from the Qumran movement and texts copied and preserved by the movement. I will not attempt to reconstruct the full ritual system here (see Kugler 2002; Arnold 2006; Regev 2003), but will attempt to raise new questions by employing perspectives from the cognitive science of religion, in order to appreciate the significance of rituals and ritual life for a religious tradition. Two perspectives in general are important. First, aspects of rituals can be explained as a reaction to the existing ritual life in the society at large. Secondly, internal tendencies and dynamics can reveal the direction in which the system was developing over time.