The Temple Scroll

Most of the scrolls recovered from the caves above the Dead Sea are copies - of the Bible, of hymns, of community rules already known or reconstructable from later tradition. The Temple Scroll is not a copy of anything that survives elsewhere. It is a composition in its own right: a long, methodical rewriting of laws from Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, reordered and expanded around a single subject - the Temple, its furnishings, its festivals, its purity rules, and the conduct of the king who serves it. It is the longest scroll found at Qumran, and one of the strangest, because of who it claims to be speaking.

Where the Torah generally presents its laws as spoken to Moses, who then relays them, long stretches of the Temple Scroll switch to direct divine speech - God addressing Israel in the first person, without Moses named as the intermediary. That shift in voice, on top of a building plan larger and more elaborate than either Solomon's or Herod's actual Temple, is what has kept scholars arguing about the scroll's purpose since it became available for study.

Out of Cave 11, into a shoebox

The scroll came from Cave 11 at Qumran, one of the caves opened by Bedouin searchers rather than by professional excavation, in 1956. Like several of the major Qumran finds, it then passed out of view into private hands rather than straight into a museum. It surfaced properly only after the Six-Day War in 1967, when the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin - by then already closely associated with the study and acquisition of Dead Sea material - arranged to acquire it from an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem. Yadin later published the editio princeps, a three-volume edition with commentary, in 1977.

Physically, the scroll is remarkable simply as an object: it is the longest manuscript recovered from the Qumran caves, made up of multiple sheets of thin animal skin stitched end to end and covered on the inside surface with close columns of Hebrew script. By the time it reached Yadin it had suffered badly - the outer layers were damaged and the skin had darkened and become brittle, the ordinary fate of organic material kept for two millennia in a fluctuating desert environment before its recovery.

A Temple that was never built

What the scroll actually contains is a rewriting of Torah law organised around a single theme. It draws on Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but reorders and expands their material into a continuous programme: detailed instructions for a Temple building and its courts, rules for the sacrifices and festivals conducted there, purity regulations governing the city that surrounds it, and a substantial section - sometimes called the Law of the King - setting out how a king of Israel should conduct himself, his army, and his court. The architectural plan it describes is considerably larger than either the First Temple built under Solomon or the Second Temple as it stood in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, including under Herod's later expansion. No Temple matching the scroll's dimensions and layout was ever built.

The most distinctive feature, though, is not the scale of the building but the grammar of the text describing it. Across long sections, the laws are spoken in God's own voice, in the first person, without the usual formula naming Moses as the one who receives and transmits them. A reader moving from the Torah into the Temple Scroll notices the shift immediately: the same kind of legal material, but with the mediating narrator largely removed.

Whatever its precise status among the people who kept it, the scroll is direct physical evidence of something significant: that Second Temple Judaism was not a single, settled reading of the Torah's Temple law but included communities actively rewriting and expanding that law, in detail and at length, around their own vision of how the sanctuary should be run. The argument the scroll is having with its readers now is very likely the same argument it was having with other Jews when it was written.