Books in Brief
The Temple Scroll
Yigael Yadin
(Israel Exploration Society: Jerusalem, 1983), 3 volumes, 1098 pp., $240
It was my good fortune to be the first to review the 1977 Hebrew edition of Yigael Yadin’s The Temple Scroll.a Now the same privilege is accorded me for the English edition. In my earlier review I wrote: “The volumes are spaciously and handsomely bound, the print is a delight to read, the illustrations are ample, and above all, the plates are remarkably clear—almost obviating the need to check the originals. The forthcoming English edition undoubtedly will possess the same virtues.” I am happy to report that my prediction has come true.
The Temple Scroll is a boxed set of three volumes plus a supplementary booklet: the first volume, a 419-page introduction; the second volume, 486 pages of text, commentary, reconstructed text, concordance and indices; and the third volume and booklet, the plates of the scroll and its fragments. Only the first two volumes were translated, since the third volume and booklet were published in both English and Hebrew in the original edition of 1977. Nevertheless, acquiring and using the English edition is absolutely necessary. In the English edition, Yadin has not been content simply to reproduce the Hebrew volumes. He has taken pains to incorporate many new readings, most of them by Elisha Qimron, who had access to the scroll. In all, there are 52 corrected readings, 15 alternate readings, and many other readings which have been proposed but rejected by Yadin.
Yadin has used the intervening years between the editions to further advantage. He has conscientiously kept abreast of the critical literature on the scroll and has incorporated his own comments on this literature in an “Addenda and Corrigenda” appendix to Volume I and throughout the commentary in Volume II.
My earlier review and Yadin’s article in this issue of BAR, “The Temple Scroll,” will suffice to give the reader a preliminary glimpse into the contents and significance of the Temple Scroll. I will simply mention here three major areas (there are many others) that are likely to stimulate further research:
1. The Date of Composition. Yadin opts for 150–125 B.C. as the likely period when the Temple Scroll was composed. Some scholars prefer a later date and others an earlier one, so perhaps Yadin did not stray far from the truth! Nevertheless, in this writer’s opinion, an earlier date must be given very serious consideration. As divinely revealed Torah, bearing the sanctity of the Pentateuch, the Temple Scroll must have been the constitution of the Qumran sect. Indeed, the Temple Scroll may even have generated the sect’s formation and withdrawal to Qumran. The Syrian monarch Antiochus III at the turn of the second century B.C. confirmed the right of Jerusalem to forbid the entry of skins of impure animals (cited in Josephus, Antiquities 12:46). This same provision barring impure skins from Jerusalem is found in the Temple Scroll, but nowhere in rabbinic literature. The absence of this prohibition in all of rabbinic literature may well indicate that the Qumran sect was already established at the turn of the second century B.C. and is pre-Maccabean in origin.
Furthermore, this historically verified right of Jerusalem to prohibit importation of impure skins into the city suggests that other purity rules that may correspond to those in the Temple Scroll once governed Jerusalem. Thus, the possibility exists that other provisions of the scroll also rest on historic foundations and are not just the fanciful product of the Qumran sect’s hermeneutics (or interpretive system). Thus, what the scroll mandated—at least in its purity laws—may simply have been a return to Jerusalem’s status quo ante.
2. Literary Influences and Dependences. The chronological, literary and ideological relationship of the Temple Scroll to contemporaneous literature such as Enoch, Jubilees and Eupolemus is another area that will require extensive investigation. (It has recently been discussed by B. Z. Wacholder in The Dawn of Qumran [Hebrew Union College Press: Cincinnati, 1983].)
3. The Origins of Christianity. The Temple Scroll is bound to give students of early Christianity a collective migraine for the next 50 years. How could the Qumran sect, and particularly something as hyper-legalistic as the Temple Scroll, have influenced Christianity, which rejected the Temple, its cult, and indeed the validity of the law itself? Yadin proposes the following chronological resolution of this paradox. Christianity came into contact with the Qumran sect at the very end of the sect’s existence, long after it had withdrawn from the mainstream of Jewry because it regarded Jerusalem as a polluted city. For the Qumran sect, the Temple had been improperly built; its cultic calendar was wrong; its sacrificial rites were erroneous and incomplete; and its sacred precincts, as well as the entire city, were defiled by human and animal impurities. Until the time when, through the grace of God, the members of the sect would be returned to Jerusalem (in the seventh year of a 40-year cosmic war) to rebuild the Temple and reinstitute the cult according to the specifications in the divinely revealed Temple Scroll, the Qumran sect would eschew Jerusalem and its Temple. Thus, Yadin argues, Qumran suspended temporarily the very rules that Christianity abrogated permanently.
I believe that Yadin’s surmise will bear him out. One need only notice that most of the laws in the Temple Scroll that are entirely independent of the Temple and its cult deal with domestic life. No wonder, then, that on issues of celibacy, divorce and polygamy the line of Christianity leads straight back to Qumran. For these very doctrines were not just taught at Qumran but were practiced there. John and Jesus and their disciples could well have observed them with their own eyes, whereas the rest of the provisions of the Temple Scroll remained pure theory. However, this is only a hypothesis—and just the first one at that. The publication of the English edition of the scroll will undoubtedly spawn hypotheses galore.
The accolade awarded Yadin in my earlier review bears repetition because, with the appearance of this magisterial English edition, it is doubly deserved: “His publication of the Temple Scroll establishes bridgeheads in every problem area of Dead Sea Scrolls research from which the scholarly community will be able to launch successful forays into the remaining terra incognita of the land of Israel at the turn of the millennium.”
Material Culture of the Land of the Bible in the Persian Period 538–332 B.C.
Ephraim Stern
(Israel Exploration Society and Aris & Phillips: Jerusalem, Israel, and Warminster, England, 1982), 287 pp., $65.00
The title of this landmark book aptly reflects the broad scope of Ephraim Stern’s definitive study. The entire range of archaeological evidence is brought to bear on the subject, producing a systematic and comprehensive picture of an important but hitherto obscure era in the history of the Holy Land.
The Persian period is the name now generally accepted for the years 538 to 332 B.C. in Israel. In 538, Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian Empire and all its possessions. By 332 the Greek conquerors—Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army—had taken over Palestine and much of the rest of the Persian Empire. Falling as it does between the well-documented Israelite and Hellenistic periods, the Persian period, until recently, seemed to be a dark age in terms of both its quality of life and our knowledge of it; scholars knew little about the Persian period, and what they did know indicated a poorly developed quality of life. Recent study and reevaluation of the materials, in which Stern has led the way, show the Persian period to be a prosperous one, when the land of Israel was as open to trade and to the influences of her neighbors as ever.
Our literary sources on this period are few and somewhat misleading. Israel is largely neglected in the Persian documents, probably because it was located in only a small corner of one of the 20 satrapies or administrative units of Cyrus’s vast Persian Empire. Nor is the period heavily represented in the Bible.
Passing references in the books of Nehemiah and Ezra are our major literary sources. The picture presented in Nehemiah is one of a desolate and depopulated land to which the Babylonian exiles return. This bleak view may be considered largely responsible for the neglect of the period by later writers as well as by modern scholars, including most early 20th-century archaeologists.
Moreover, the remains of the Persian period have been difficult to define archaeologically. They fall in relatively late and often eroded strata. Until recently, few characteristic artifacts of the period had been recognized. A striking example of these difficulties is the misidentification of Persian graves at Gezer as Philistine by the early excavators. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, scholars have often been unable or uninterested in separating the remains of the Persian period from subsequent Hellenistic remains, referring instead to a vast “Persian-Hellenistic” stratum from the sixth to the first centuries B.C.
Stern’s book goes a long way toward remedying our ignorance about the Persian period. The remains of the Persian period in Israel that he systematically reviews belie the bleak picture presented in Nehemiah. Stern begins with a regional site-by-site listing of excavated and surveyed remains that can be attributed to the Persian period. Compiling this list was no easy task: Stern tracked down misidentified or overlooked Persian levels by carefully sifting through reports of early excavations. The surprising result is an enlarged list of settlements of the Persian period, a list that refutes the traditional view that Israel was sparsely settled then. Indeed, Stern’s overview shows that several regions of Israel were more densely settled in the Persian period than in the earlier Israelite or in the later Hellenistic periods.
Having established the extent of habitation in the Persian period, Stern moves on in chapters two and three to describe sites that illuminate life (architecture) and death (tombs) of the period. A rudimentary form of orthogonal town planning developed in Israel in the Persian period. Another architectural feature of the period was a type of “open court” house influenced by the architecture of several neighboring cultures: Assyrian, Greek, Syrian and Persian. The structure known as the residency at Lachish is particularly representative of this architectural mixture. On the other hand, the design of the three temples identified from the Persian period derives primarily from the mixed Mesopotamian-Egyptian style of the Phoenician tradition.
The tombs of the Persian period also show a variety of cultural influences, both in their building methods and in the gifts buried with the dead. Stern divides the burials into four types: shaft graves (underground chambers entered through a shaft), stone-lined pits, simple pits, and anthropoid sarcophagi (coffins in human form). The shaft tombs are limited to the western part of the Persian Empire and contain a wealth of Greek pottery and Phoenician and Greek coins. The geographical distribution of the shaft tombs and their associated grave goods reflect western influence from the Phoenician-Greco milieu of contemporaneous Cyprus. The grave goods in the tombs, on the other hand, are imported Achaemenid Persian products displaying the range of weapons, metal vessels and gold and silver jewelry beloved by the Persians. Particularly evocative of the mixture of cultural influences in the funerary practices of the period is an anthropoid sarcophagus on which a disconcertingly Greek head stares out from the standard Egyptian coffin body (figure 103). Both the chapter on architecture and that on tombs are lavishly illustrated with good plans and with photographs of Persian and comparative material that demonstrate the influence of many cultures on the Holy Land in the Persian period.
The movable furnishings of life and death are covered in the next five chapters. These furnishings reveal the same cosmopolitan mixture of cultures seen in the architecture. Chapter four contains a survey of the Persian period pottery found in Israel. The discussion is divided into two parts locally manufactured pottery and imports. The vast majority of the imported pottery is from classical Athens with some earlier material from Corinth and eastern Greece; another major source of imports is Cyprus. Stern notes that the pattern of imports gives us information about Israel’s trading partners during the Persian period. The section on local pottery is an extremely important contribution to the study of the Persian period, since it is the first extensive publication of the material. Archaeologists working in the field will be grateful for this guide through the previously uncharted seas of Persian pottery. Unfortunately, however, the quality of the photographs and drawings here is inferior to the standard set in the rest of the volume.
Chapter five covers a variety of artifacts generally classed by the archaeologist as “miscellaneous small finds”—furniture, jewelry, glass and metal vessels, household utensils, cosmetic articles and weapons. These mundane “minor finds” often evoke the daily life of the past far better than do major monuments. These artifacts—bronze arrowheads of Scytho-Iranian type, Achaemenid Persian jewelry of gold and silver, grotesque glass baubles of Phoenician origin, and alabaster perfume bottles from Egypt—demonstrate once again the vigorous commerce and the mixture of cultures that mark the Persian period in Israel. The inhabitants of Israel in the Persian period clearly were not denied the small luxuries of daily life.
Stern turns his attention in his sixth chapter to ritual objects—terra cotta and bronze figurines found in sanctuary deposits and portable incense altars. A new box-shaped type of stone altar appears in the Persian period, superseding the familiar horned type of the Israelite era. Stern argues convincingly that this new type derived from the Mesopotamian tradition and was modified by Phoenician craftsmen. Religious figurines show more varied influences and include representations of the Greek Herakles, Egyptian Osiris, and Syrian Astarte, but like the altars, the figurines are thought to be primarily of Phoenician manufacture.
Chapters seven and eight are devoted to the epigraphic remains of the Persian period—seals, stamps (often used to impress pottery), weights and coins. As we might expect, the imported seals come from all the neighboring cultures, while those of local manufacture show a mixture of these same influences. The seals bearing individual names, such as that of “Shelomith, maidservant of the governor Elnathen” (figure 329), offer a tantalizing glimpse of the people behind the artifacts, while the official stamps of Judea and Samaria may show the hands of the tax collectors of the great king of Persia. The coins are all Greek, Phoenician and local. Oddly, no imported coins of Persian manufacture are found in Israel. Whether or not Persian coins from the center of the Persian Empire circulated in Israel is uncertain; Stern argues, however, that the archaeological evidence does indicate that Persian administrators in Israel did mint their own individual coins.
Stern concludes with a masterful summary of the book’s content and an outline of the geographical and historical background of Palestine in the Persian period. This is a very useful chapter, and the general reader might want to begin here and there to consult pertinent chapters for more information about specific items of interest.
The reviewer is left with little to criticize and much to admire in this book. One would hope that in future editions some scholarly apparatus—an index, a complete bibliography, better labeling of plates—might be added, but these are technical points. As it stands, Stern’s book is an invaluable reference for the scholar, a lavishly illustrated guide to an important but little-known era in the history of the Holy Land. Even the layperson might enjoy dipping into this book from time to time.