The Temple Scroll

What the scroll contains is what made it the most contested single document in the Qumran library. The Temple Scroll does not present itself as the work of any human author. It presents itself as the direct speech of God, addressed to Moses at Sinai, with the prophet as the silent listener. The work reorganises and rewrites the laws of the Temple and the festivals from the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy into a single continuous divine utterance. The text begins, after a damaged opening column, with the words that scholars reconstruct as God’s instruction for the building of a Temple far more elaborate than either Solomon’s First Temple or the Hellenistic-period Second Temple that stood in Jerusalem at the time the scroll was copied. The Temple Scroll proceeds through the festivals of the year, through the sacrificial system, through the purity laws of the Temple, and through a long section of legal material covering the king, the army, prophecy, the stranger, the sabbatical year, and the laws of marriage and sexual conduct. The work ends, after sixty-six columns, with the laws of divorce and the procedure for the trial of an accused wife. It is the most theologically ambitious single text that the caves of Qumran produced.

How the Scroll Reached Jerusalem

The history of how the Temple Scroll came out of the Judaean desert is one of the more curious in the long history of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The original seven Dead Sea Scrolls from Cave 1 were found in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd of the Ta’amireh tribe, Muhammad edhah the min al-Khalami, and they were brought to Bethlehem in the following year by a series of intermediaries who eventually sold them to the Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan at St Mark’s Monastery, Mar Samuel, in the spring of 1948. The seven Cave 1 scrolls were divided up over the next several years between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, and a consortium of foreign scholars headed by the Dominican Father Roland de Vaux and the American archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding. The Cave 4 scrolls, the largest single cache, were excavated in the 1952 season by de Vaux’s team and held under a publication monopoly by the small editorial team that had first worked on the Cave 1 material. The Cave 11 scrolls were discovered by a Ta’amireh Bedouin in early 1956, and the bulk of them were quickly acquired by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities. The Temple Scroll was not among them.

Yadin’s own account of the acquisition, told in his posthumous memoir, gives the details. The Bedouin who had found the Cave 11 material in 1956 had kept the Temple Scroll apart, recognising it as a more valuable find than the others. He sold it through a Bethlehem antiquities dealer named Khalil Iskander Shahin, who then sold it onward, in fragments, to an Armenian rug merchant in Beirut named Tufyo. Tufyo in turn sold the largest piece, about seven metres of the scroll, in 1961 to a Jerusalem dealer named Yusef Nasser, who sold it to the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, who had been a soldier in the Palmach, the commander of the Israeli Defence Forces’ General Staff, and the architect of the 1956 Sinai campaign. Yadin bought the scroll in May 1961 and announced the acquisition publicly only in June 1967, after the Six-Day War had given Israel access to the Dead Sea coast and the scrolls in the Rockefeller Museum in Jordanian. East Yadin had acted on the assumption that the War Scroll that had been published from Cave 1 was the largest Qumran scroll, and only after the unrolling did he realise that his acquisition was something different and considerably larger. The Temple Scroll, which had been sequestered by the Jordanian-backed editorial monopoly of the late 1950s, was now in the State of Israel’s hands, and the monopoly had been broken.

The acquisition was not uncontroversial. A number of the original Cave 1 editorial team, who had been working under a Jordanian-granted monopoly since 1954, protested that the scroll had been smuggled out of Jordanian-held territory during a period in which the monopoly should have applied. The protests came to nothing politically, but they poisoned scholarly relationships for years. The editorial monopoly, which had lasted almost fifteen years, was broken within two years of Yadin’s announcement, and the bulk of the unpublished Qumran material was finally released in 1991 under the pressure of a deadline set by the Huntington Library in California, which had been holding the bulk of the unpublished photographs in trust for the monopoly’s surviving members. The Temple Scroll was thus the wedge that broke the monopoly. Had Yadin not acquired it, the publication of the rest of the Qumran library might have been delayed by a decade or more. The scholarly importance of the scroll is therefore in part a consequence of how it was acquired and how its acquisition forced the release of the rest of the cave material.

The scroll itself was in poor physical condition when it reached Jerusalem. The outer columns, which would have contained the introduction and the opening of the Temple description, were so brittle that several pieces were lost in the initial handling. Yadin had the scroll cleaned, flattened, and mounted on linen in the conservation laboratory of the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, where it is kept today under carefully controlled humidity. The conservation took several years. The first photographic facsimile was published in 1967 in two volumes of Yadin’s preliminary edition. The full critical edition, with translation and commentary, took longer. Volume one, containing the introduction and the Temple description, appeared in 1983 under the title The Temple Scroll, with the subtitle The Hidden Law of the Dead Sea Sect. Volume two, on the festivals and the sacrificial system, appeared in 1989. Volume three, on the purity laws and the law of the king, appeared posthumously in 2006. The third volume was completed by Yadin’s editorial team under the direction of his widow, Carmela Yadin, and his student and successor as editor of the Israel Exploration Journal, Amihai Mazar. A fourth volume, dealing with the Temple Scroll’s text-critical relationship to the masoretic text of the Pentateuch, was added in 2010, completing the project that Yadin had begun almost fifty years earlier.

The Voice of God at Sinai

The single most distinctive literary feature of the Temple Scroll is the way it handles the voice of the speaker. The text of the standard Pentateuch, in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy in particular, presents itself as the speech of Moses, addressed to Israel in the plains of Moab at the end of the forty years of wandering. The Temple Scroll takes the same legal material and re-presents it as the direct speech of God, addressed to Moses at Sinai. The shift of speaker is not a stylistic flourish; it changes the theological weight of every single law in the document. A law that Moses delivered at Moab is a law that one generation received and that subsequent generations must obey. A law that God delivered at Sinai, to the silent listening Moses, is a law that has the same standing as the Ten Commandments; it is a law that the present generation heard directly from the mouth of God. The Temple Scroll is, in effect, a second Torah, presented in the voice of the first Torah’s speaker.

The literary device is not new in Jewish tradition. The book of Jubilees, which was found in several copies among the Qumran manuscripts, presents the same Sinai revelation as a retelling in the voice of an angel speaking to Moses. The book of Deuteronomy itself has a long tradition in Second Temple Judaism of being read as a renewed covenant, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is closely related to the Samaritan liturgy, contains a set of expansions on the Deuteronomic laws that are sometimes attributed to the prophet Eldad and Medad or to Phinehas the priest. The Temple Scroll’s particular innovation is to apply this device to the entire body of Temple and festival law, not just to the Deuteronomic code, and to do it in such a way that the result reads as a continuous divine utterance rather than as a series of citations of the biblical text. The scroll harmonises, reorganises, and supplements the biblical material; it does not merely cite it.

The harmonisation takes a particular form in the calendar material. The Temple Scroll prescribes a 364-day solar calendar, organised in fifty-two weeks of seven days, with no intercalation. This calendar was in use, in slightly varying forms, in a number of Jewish groups in the Second Temple period: the book of Jubilees, the Qumran scrolls, and the Aramaic Levi Document all attest versions of it. The Temple Scroll’s version of the 364-day calendar differs from the versions of the other texts in the details of which priestly courses are on duty on which sabbaths, but the basic structure is the same. The calendar is a major element in the broader Qumran dispute with the Temple establishment in Jerusalem, which used a lunisolar calendar coordinated with the agricultural festivals of the Jewish year. The Temple Scroll’s calendar implies that the Jerusalem Temple, by using the lunisolar calendar, was observing the festivals on the wrong days. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Temple Scroll was composed in a context where the Jerusalem Temple was at least in some sense opposed.

The festival calendar section, columns XIII to XXIX, runs to seventeen columns of text, more than a quarter of the scroll. The section opens with the instruction for the paschal sacrifice and the seven-day festival of unleavened bread, harmonising the conflicting instructions in Exodus 12, Leviticus 23, and Deuteronomy 16. The harmonisation proceeds through the festival of weeks (Pentecost), the festival of the seventh month (the autumnal new year), the day of atonement, the festival of tabernacles, and the closing assembly on the eighth day. Each festival is given a specific set of sacrifices, including a fixed number of bulls, rams, and male lambs, and a fixed quantity of fine flour mixed with oil. The festival calendar is more detailed than the corresponding material in Leviticus 23 or Numbers 28-29, and it includes regulations that are not present in the masoretic text at all, including the order in which the sacrifices are to be presented and the duties of the priests during the seven days of the festival of unleavened bread.

The Temple and Its Three Courts

The single most striking piece of architectural imagination in the Temple Scroll is the description of the Temple and its three concentric courts. The description occupies the first ten columns of the scroll, from column II to column XIII. The plan is, by any standard, monumental. The Temple is set in a rectangular precinct roughly five hundred and sixty cubits (about 280 metres) long and five hundred and sixty cubits wide, oriented to face east. The precinct is bounded by a wall, and access is through three gates, one on the east, one on the north, one on the south. There is no gate on the west; the western wall of the precinct is the wall of the city of Jerusalem. The western wall of the precinct thus coincides with the western wall of the city, which the Temple Scroll takes as the highest point of the Temple mount, the place from which the building of the Temple should begin.

Inside the outer wall, three concentric courts are arranged around a central sanctuary. The innermost court is the court of the priests, two hundred and eighty cubits (about 140 metres) square, accessed only by the priests and reserved for the service of the altar. The middle court is the court of the men of Israel, a hundred and sixty cubits (about 80 metres) wide, surrounding the court of the priests on three sides and reserved for ritually pure Israelite men over the age of twenty. The outer court is the court of the women, two hundred and ninety cubits (about 145 metres) wide, surrounding the court of the men on three sides and reserved for women, children, and proselytes. The Temple Scroll is the earliest Jewish text in which a women’s court is explicitly named as a distinct part of the Temple precinct; the later Herodian Temple, completed in the 60s CE, would include such a court as well. The arrangement of the courts is described in language that draws on the priestly chapter of Ezekiel 40-48, but it is clarified to a precision that the prophet’s vision does not have, and it is presented as a divine command rather than as a prophetic metaphor.

The central sanctuary is a square building of one hundred cubits (about 50 metres) on each side, oriented to face east, with a flat roof of cedar wood overlaid with gold. The sanctuary is divided into three rooms: the outer porch, the hekhal (the main hall), and the debir (the inner sanctum). The arrangement follows the description in 1 Kings 6-8 and in 2 Chronicles 3-5, but with significant differences. The Temple Scroll’s debir is larger than the description in Kings; it has its own separate access door from the hekhal and a separate door from the courtyard; and the hekhal itself has additional features that are not described in the canonical text. The Temple Scroll is, in fact, the earliest Jewish text in which the debir is presented as a separate structural element accessible from inside the sanctuary rather than as a chamber entered only from the hekhal.

Outside the sanctuary, the altar of burnt offering is a square structure of fifty cubits (about 25 metres) on each side, made of unhewn stone. The altar is approached by a ramp from the south, not by steps; the Temple Scroll’s prohibition on steps to the altar is one of the few places where the scroll explicitly disagrees with the description in Exodus 20. The altar has a horn at each corner and a continuous ledge running around its perimeter at half its height. The whole is described in language that draws on the description in Exodus 27-30 and in 2 Chronicles 4, but with the precision of an architect’s drawing rather than the impressionism of a narrative. The architectural description is the longest single section of the scroll, and it is the section in which Yadin’s archaeological instincts were most clearly engaged. Yadin read the description as a programme for an actual Temple that could have been built in the late Second Temple period, and he used his own archaeological training to reconstruct the building’s plan in his 1983 edition.

Purity, the Law of the King, and the Last Columns

The purity laws of the Temple Scroll, which occupy columns XLV through LI of the scroll, are the second-most-detailed section after the architectural description. The laws treat the same general subject as Leviticus 11-15 and Numbers 19, but they expand and reorganise the material in a number of ways. The Temple Scroll’s purity code is more rigorous than the masoretic text in several respects: the scroll requires immersion in living water rather than in drawn water, requires that the immersion be witnessed, and requires a specific form of the ashes of the red heifer. The scroll also extends the rules for the removal of impurity to a number of cases not treated in the masoretic text, including the impurity contracted by contact with a dead creeping thing and the impurity contracted by a man who has had a nocturnal emission. The scroll’s purity code is, in its main lines, consistent with the priestly code in Leviticus and Numbers, but it is presented as a stricter version of the same code, with the additional material intended to close what the scroll’s authors regarded as loopholes in the biblical text.

The Law of the King, columns LII through LXVI, occupies the second half of the scroll. The section opens with the instruction that the king must be chosen by God, that the king must be an Israelite born of an Israelite mother, and that the king must not be a foreigner. The king is forbidden to multiply horses, to multiply wives, or to multiply silver and gold to an excessive degree; he must write a copy of the Torah for himself and must read it every day of his life. The law is closely modelled on Deuteronomy 17:14-20, but it expands the Deuteronomic instruction into a much more elaborate code, including the requirement that the king establish a system of public schools and a system of public courts. The king’s army is regulated separately, in a section that draws on the Deuteronomic laws of war and on the rules for the holy war in Numbers 31. The king is required to lead the army in person when it goes to war, and he is required to consult the priests and the prophet before the army goes out to battle.

The last columns of the scroll, from LIX to LXVI, contain a code of marriage law, sexual conduct, and the procedure for the trial of an accused wife. The section opens with the law that a man who has married a wife and lived with her for a year must lead the army in person when the army goes out to war; this is closely parallel to Deuteronomy 24:5, which the Temple Scroll quotes and expands. The next section contains the law of the captive woman (Deuteronomy 21:10-14), which is restated in a more elaborate form. The scroll then proceeds through the laws of the second wife (Deuteronomy 21:15-17), the laws of the rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), and the laws of the hanging of the corpse of an executed criminal (Deuteronomy 21:22-23). The last law in the scroll, in column LXVI, is the procedure for the trial of an accused wife who is suspected of having committed adultery. The scroll’s version of the trial of the suspected wife is closely parallel to the masoretic text of Numbers 5:11-31, but it includes a number of additions and clarifications, including the requirement that the husband bring a specific tithe of barley as the offering, and the requirement that the priest read a specific set of imprecations aloud before the woman drinks the water of bitterness. The scroll ends abruptly, mid-column, without a formal conclusion. The work was probably not finished before the copy was deposited in the cave.

The Qumran Question and the Reception of the Scroll

The single most contested scholarly question about the Temple Scroll is whether it was composed by the Qumran community itself or by some other Jewish group in the Second Temple period. Yadin’s monumental edition of 1983 argued for the Qumran attribution, on the grounds that the scroll’s calendar, its purity laws, its emphasis on the solar year, and its rewriting of the Deuteronomic code are all consistent with the broader Qumran library’s theology. The argument has been strongly contested by a number of scholars, including John Strugnell, Joseph Baumgarten, and Florentino Garcia Martinez. The alternative view, that the Temple Scroll was composed outside the Qumran community in the priestly circles of the Second Temple period, has a number of arguments in its favour: the scroll is not cited in any of the Qumran sectarian texts (the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Habakkuk Pesher, the Damascus Document), the language of the scroll is closer to the priestly Hebrew of the canonical text than to the Hebrew of the sectarian scrolls, and the scroll’s interest in the Temple presupposes a community that was actively engaged with the Temple cult rather than one that had separated from it.

The most recent edition of the scroll, the 2010 publication of the fourth volume of Yadin’s edition with new photographs, has not settled the question. The conservative view in current scholarship, represented by the work of Lawrence Schiffman and Hannah Cotton, is that the scroll was composed outside the Qumran community but was copied and preserved within it. The argument turns on the fact that the scroll’s halakhic rulings are not necessarily identical with the rulings of the Qumran community; some are stricter, some are looser, and some are at the same level of stringency as the masoretic text. The Temple Scroll is, in other words, a work that the Qumran community treated as authoritative but that was not necessarily written by them. The scholarly debate is not likely to be resolved, and probably will not be, until the unpublished Qumran fragments from the late 1950s and early 1960s are fully integrated into the discussion. The publication of the remainder of the Temple Scroll material in the official Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series is, as of this writing, incomplete.

The reception of the Temple Scroll in modern scholarship has been substantial. The scroll has been the subject of four major English-language monographs (Yadin’s three-volume edition, John Strugnell’s reading of the Temple description, Daniel Schiffman’s reading of the purity section, and Dwight Swanson-Monroe’s 2022 critical edition of columns 48-66), at least three German-language studies (including the monographs by Jürgen Becker and by Maier Johann), and several more substantial collections of essays. The scroll has also been the subject of a major archaeological investigation of the Temple mount, which has produced a number of fragments of stone from the Herodian Temple that are consistent with the dimensions given in the Temple Scroll. The excavations at the southern and western foot of the Temple mount, conducted by the archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer on behalf of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and the Israel Antiquities Authority, have produced a body of architectural evidence that is broadly consistent with the Temple Scroll’s plan, although the evidence is not decisive in the absence of a complete excavation of the Temple mount itself.

The Temple Scroll has also entered popular culture in a number of ways. The complete scroll is on permanent display in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in the same underground chamber that houses the Great Isaiah Scroll and the War Scroll. The scroll has been the subject of several documentary films, including a 1994 BBC documentary produced in association with the Israel Antiquities Authority, and it is mentioned in several popular works on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scroll’s publication in 1983 was, by Yadin’s own estimate, the most significant single moment in the post-war study of Jewish history. The Temple Scroll is now the longest single piece of Jewish writing from the Second Temple period, and it is the text most likely to retain scholarly attention in the next generation of Qumran studies.

The Parchment, the Pits, and the Conservation Problem

The animal skin on which the Temple Scroll is written is unusual in a number of respects. A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science, working in collaboration with the Israel Antiquities Authority’s conservation laboratory, has published a series of studies on the parchment since 2007. The most striking result came from a non-invasive X-ray fluorescence study, which showed that the chlorine-to-bromine ratio in the parchment is about three times higher than would be expected from a piece of skin that had been processed in fresh water. The most plausible explanation is that the skin was processed using water from the Dead Sea itself, which has a chloride concentration roughly a hundred times that of fresh water. The skin would have been soaked in the saline brine of the Dead Sea, stretched, and scraped in the standard Second Temple fashion, before being written on. The implication is striking: the scribe who prepared the skin lived somewhere with access to the Dead Sea. This places the original production of the scroll, if not the final composition, in the Judaean desert itself.

The radiocarbon dating of the scroll has been more equivocal. The accelerator mass spectrometry tests, conducted at the University of Arizona in the late 1990s on three small fragments of the scroll, gave a calibrated date range of 50 BCE to 80 CE at 68 per cent confidence, which is consistent with the paleographic dating of the Herodian bookhand. The Arizona measurements were repeated by a French team in the early 2000s and confirmed. The result is significant because it places the scroll’s transmission into the same period as the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Temple Scroll was, on the most likely interpretation, copied in the generation immediately before the destruction, and was deposited in Cave 11 sometime in the years between the Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE and the Roman pacification of the area. The Cave 4 fragment 4Q524 may be even older, on the basis of its script, and may belong to the late Hasmonaean period of the late first century BCE. The textual evidence of the three copies is consistent with a date of composition in the second half of the second century BCE, with the final form of the work probably stabilising in the early first century BCE.

The conservation of the scroll has been one of the major achievements of the Israel Museum’s conservation laboratory. The parchment, when it arrived in Jerusalem, was so brittle that the outer columns could not be unrolled without further damage. The scroll was first cleaned by suction under a microscope, then relaxed in a humidity chamber at 90 per cent relative humidity for several weeks, then flattened under gradual pressure, then mounted on a backing of linen that had been specially treated with a solution of Paraloid B-72 in acetone. The mounting process took several years. The scroll is now displayed in the Shrine of the Book in a climate-controlled showcase that maintains the temperature at 21 degrees Celsius and the relative humidity at 50 per cent. The display case was designed by the architects Armand Bartos and Frederick Myer, who also designed the showcase for the Great Isaiah Scroll in the same underground chamber. The Shrine of the Book was built specifically to house the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been acquired by the State of Israel, and the design was influenced by the discovery of the scrolls at the moment of the founding of the state in 1948.

The single most distinctive physical feature of the Temple Scroll, apart from its length, is the thinness of the parchment. The skin is, by the Weizmann Institute’s measurements, only about one tenth of a millimetre thick, roughly a third of the thickness of the parchment used for the Great Isaiah Scroll. The skin is so thin that it is almost transparent in transmitted light, and the writing on the back of a given sheet shows faintly through to the front. The scribe was therefore working with a material that required extreme care; a slip of the knife would have ruined the entire sheet. The same thinness is attested in a small number of other Qumran manuscripts, including the Great Psalms Scroll from Cave 11, but it is not common in the broader Dead Sea Scrolls library. The implication is that the Temple Scroll was prepared by a scribe of particularly high standing, who was given the task of preparing a special copy of a particularly important text. The thinness of the parchment is not accidental but is part of the work’s sacred character.

The Scroll’s Place in Jewish Law and Liturgy

The Temple Scroll has had a more complicated relationship with later Jewish tradition than the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls have. The biblical scrolls (the Great Isaiah Scroll, the Habakkuk Pesher, the commentaries on Micah and on Zephaniah) are versions of texts that continued to be authoritative in the Jewish and Christian traditions, and their relationship to the masoretic text and to the Septuagint has been the subject of a large scholarly literature. The Temple Scroll, by contrast, is a non-canonical work that did not enter either the rabbinic or the Christian canon, and it has been studied as a witness to the religious imagination of a particular Jewish group in the late Second Temple period rather than as a source for the text of any of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Its significance for the study of Jewish law is, however, considerable.

The scroll’s halakhic rulings have been compared in detail with the rulings of the Sadducean tradition preserved in the Mishnah, the rulings of the Pharisaic tradition preserved in the Tosefta and the two Talmuds, and the rulings of the Qumran community preserved in the Damascus Document and the Community Rule. The comparison has produced a complicated picture. On a number of points (the calendar, the purity laws, the temple tax, the laws of the sabbatical year), the Temple Scroll is consistent with the Qumran halakhah and inconsistent with the Pharisaic tradition. On a number of other points (the laws of marriage, the laws of war, the laws of the king), the Temple Scroll is consistent with the masoretic text and inconsistent with the rulings of the Qumran community. The scroll does not, in other words, simply reproduce the halakhah of the Qumran community; it reproduces a halakhah that is closer to the masoretic text than to the Qumran text on a substantial number of points. The conclusion that scholars have drawn is that the scroll was composed in a context that was familiar with the masoretic text as a basis for halakhic discussion but was also willing to expand and supplement it.

The scroll’s relationship with the Samaritan Pentateuch has been the subject of a long-standing scholarly interest. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the version of the Torah used by the Samaritan community, contains a number of expansions on the masoretic text that are also present in the Temple Scroll. The most striking is the Samaritan addition to Deuteronomy 27, in which the curses of Mount Ebal are followed by a long section that is not in the masoretic text and that is also present, in slightly different form, in the Temple Scroll. The same expansion is attested in a number of pre-Samaritan Qumran manuscripts, including the Reworked Pentateuch fragments from Cave 4. The shared expansion suggests that there was, in the late Second Temple period, a body of tradition that was current in Palestine and that influenced both the Samaritan community and the composers of the Temple Scroll. The same body of tradition may have influenced the Qumran community on a number of other points. The Temple Scroll is, on this reading, a witness to a broader Palestinian Jewish tradition that was eventually overtaken by the Pharisaic tradition preserved in the Mishnah.

The scroll’s theology of the Temple has been the subject of a substantial literature in its own right. The scroll’s argument that the Temple and its cult are to be organised in the form that the scroll sets out is a programme for a comprehensive reform of the Temple cult, and the implicit message of the programme is that the Temple as it existed in the late Second Temple period was not observing the cult as God had commanded. The scroll’s theology is, in other words, a theology of reform, and it is a theology of reform that is presented as a recovery of the original Mosaic revelation. The same theological programme is visible, in more attenuated form, in the book of Jubilees and in the Aramaic Levi Document, both of which were also found among the Qumran manuscripts. The Temple Scroll is the most elaborate articulation of this programme in the entire Qumran library, and it is the text that gives the programme its most concrete and architectural form. The programme was, so far as one can tell, never implemented in the historical Temple. The Herodian Temple that was in use at the time the scroll was copied did not have the three concentric courts that the scroll describes, and the Herodian programme of Temple expansion, which was carried out under Herod the Great in the late first century BCE, did not follow the scroll’s plan. The scroll remained a programme for a Temple that was not built.

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