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Re: orion Bible quotes in the Temple scroll?

From: Tom Simms <tsimms@quartz.nbnet.nb.ca>
Subject: Re: orion Bible quotes in the Temple scroll?
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 18:27:17 AST

On Wed, 17 Sep 1997 22:23:36 -0500, jpman@accesscomm.net writes:
>dwashbur@nyx.net wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a source that lists actual biblical quotes in the

   [... snip ... data already seen ...]


>    Schiffman covers biblical exegesis in the Temple Scroll beginning
>onPage 258 and its midrashic style to the Pentateuch.  He mentions
>specifically the paraphrases of Deuteronomy at Temple Scroll 51:11 through
>56:21 and 60:1 through 66:17 and points out that the biblical substratum was
>not Masoretic.
>
>Jack
>
   My first contact with the Temple Scroll was from Yigael Yadin's
   article on it in the pages of _Biblical Archaeology Review_,1984,
   X(5), pp. 33Ä49.  It soon wasn't my last.  I had much earlier read
   Yadin's text on ANE Arms and knew of his name and what he was doing
   through the pages of Hugh Schonfield.  But I never heard mentioned
   again the idea that the Temple Scroll was, as Yadin had noted, a
   new Deuteronomy written not in the third person but in the First
   Person by Yahweh Himself.  Your comment above, distancing the
   Scroll from the Massora, is as near as anyone on this list has come
   to repeating what my 1990 book, _Behind The Bible_, summed up on p,
   249 from the sources noted above, vide: Yadin 
     "completed the publication of The Temple Scroll shortly before
     his recent sudden death.  The results are astounding!  The
     plan of the Temple has much in common with the open model of
     Akhu En Aten's Temples to the Aten.  Outside the Holy of
     Holies, rising 40 cubits high (60 feet), a tower over 20
     cubits square contained a staircase in its center rising to a
     covered gate which led to a bridge to the top of the Holy of
     Holies.  All this, inside and out, was to be plated with gold! 
     The purpose of this extravagant creation decreed by Yahwah
     himself was to worship the Sun!"

   There are, needless to say, more comments in the Scroll itself than
   my poor summary given above.  In my book, I took the view this
   Pseudo-Deuteronomic text was an Essene view.  Seven years later, my
   view is not made with such broad strokes.  Nonetheless, the Temple
   Scroll indicates there were many contemporary texts that do not
   support the Massoretic Versions the Rabbis redacted and preserved
   so faithfully.  

   In 1990, I wrote, as I argued from poor sources for a Post Exile
   composition,  "`Ezra imposed a solution.  He suppressed every
   version except the one he brought back from Babylon.  The Temple
   Scroll of Qumran, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch teach
   us that variants survived Ezra's imposition.  We may have lost
   other versions.

   Today, I would stand by my statement though I would argue for a
   later completion.  I took the historical reality of Ezra seriously
   in the 1980's when I was writing my text.

   I wonder why this data never gets mentioned.  

   Frankly, I had forgotten my own conclusions in the plethora of
   conflicting ideas of this and other Lists.

   Thank you, Jack, for bringing these thoughts back.

Tom Simms