The Temple Scroll (11QT)

Reflection

The Temple Scroll — 11QT — is the longest surviving Dead Sea Scroll: 8.146 meters of parchment preserving sixty-six columns of Hebrew, recovered from Cave 11 at Qumran in 1956 and published by Yigael Yadin in 1977 after a decade of negotiated acquisition through the Bethlehem antiquities trade. The text is a rewritten Torah cast in the first person as direct divine speech, drawing material from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy and reorganizing it around an elaborate description of an ideal future temple and its purity regulations. The extant copy was made in a late Herodian formal hand around the turn of the eras, though Cave 4 fragments demonstrate the composition is earlier — Yadin and Lawrence Schiffman both place its original composition in the second century BC. The temple described is not Solomon's, nor Herod's, nor any temple known to history: it is a three-courted square complex with twelve gates named for the tribes, surrounded by purity zones extending into the surrounding countryside. Schiffman has argued that the scroll preserves the priestly halakhic vision of the Zadokite community that fled to Qumran in protest of Hasmonean priestly practices. The Temple Scroll stands as the most extended Jewish architectural and ritual vision surviving from the late Second Temple period, written in the same century when the real Herodian platform was being raised on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem.

Sources: Yigael Yadin, The Temple Scroll, 3 vols. (Israel Exploration Society, 1983); Lawrence H. Schiffman, The Courtyards of the House of the Lord (Brill, 2008); James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Eerdmans, 2nd ed. 2010).