Reconstruction of the (Dead Sea) Temple Scroll

Reconstruction of the (Dead Sea) Temple Scroll

Wednesday, April 26, 2023 / 7 pm at the Social Hall of the Bender JCC

Andrew Gross, Catholic University

The Temple Scroll is the longest of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, with sixty-six columns having been preserved in its most complete exemplar.  It rewrites the Torah by, among other things, harmonizing its discussions of the festival calendar and its laws of ritual purity.  Modern scholars named the composition for its long, detailed description of the Temple precinct.

Five copies of the Temple Scroll, perhaps six, were discovered at Qumran, stemming from three different caves .The most complete manuscript was first published in 1977, and the other manuscripts, which are highly fragmentary, were published in the 1990s.

In recent years, high resolution photography has greatly improved our ability to read the ink on these scrolls and on the scroll fragments.  In addition, highly sophisticated online platforms have made these photographs very accessible and easy to use.  With this technology in hand, the time was ripe to produce a new edition of all the manuscripts of the Temple Scroll.

This presentation will briefly survey the contents of the Temple Scroll, demonstrate how this new technology has aided in producing a new edition, and explain the limitations of this technology.

For questions or to request accommodations contact:

Donald O Kane