Scholars generally place the Vendidad's composition later than the Gathas and treat it as reflecting a more developed, more procedurally minded stage of Zoroastrian priestly practice, one increasingly concerned with defining and managing ritual pollution in fine grained detail. Its Younger Avestan language groups it with the Yashts and the Visperad rather than with the archaic Gathic layer of the Yasna, and its prose style, heavy with legal formula and repetition, is unlike the hymnic material elsewhere in the Avesta.
The Vendidad's standing within the tradition has not been uniform. Its purity provisions, particularly around corpse handling and the treatment of menstruation, have been points of both strict traditional observance and, among reformist and diaspora Zoroastrian communities in the modern period, reinterpretation or de-emphasis, since maintaining them in full is difficult outside a society organized around them. Manuscripts frequently transmit the Vendidad together with the Visperad and Yasna in a combined ceremonial reading called the Vendidad sade, even though its content and function are distinct from either.
Comparative studies have drawn parallels between the Vendidad's purity code and similar concerns elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern and Indo-Iranian legal material, though the Vendidad's emphasis on corpse pollution specifically is considered unusually developed even within that wider comparative context.