Temple Scroll Abstract

Here the abstract of the essay on the Temple Scroll, the seminar for which was held on Tuesday:

In 1967, Yigael Yadin acquired the Temple scroll, the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scroll is comprised of four parts; plans for a new Temple, purity regulations, a festival calendar, and a Deuteronomic paraphrase of the law of the king. As the first editor of the text, Yadin posed the initial conclusions from the document. He claimed it to be of Essene origin, an item of additional Torah, a sectarian text and dated the Scroll to the second half of the second century BCE. All of these statements have been heavily disputed, revealing much about the people who wrote the Temple Scroll, and the political atmosphere of the Second Temple Period. Unique in its genre, and illuminating in its proclamations, the scroll has been dubbed by scholars, such as Hartmut Stegemann, to be the most important of the preserved Dead Sea Scrolls. This paper aims to detail some of the main issues that have arisen since the Scroll's publication and determine why it is considered so important.

Leon Rogers