THE INSTITUTIONS OF IN THE TEMPLE SCROLL

Hartmut Stegemann*

The Symposium "Forty Years of Research in the Dead Sea Scrolls" was organized in the State of Israel where the leading is . One might ask why its leading religion is not known as "Israeli"; or, indeed, why the official language is neither "Israeli" nor "Jewish" but Hebrew. Many different factors lie behind these terminological distinctions whose origins can be traced at least as far back as the . The Temple Scroll may help us detect the actual historical circumstances which explain such distinctions and, what is decisive, the meaning behind them, the different concepts of "Israel" and of "Judaism". Certainly the Temple Scroll gives us evidence our scholarly predecessors could not have had to establish the true beginning of "Judaism" in history.

I. SOME BASIC OBSERVATIONS

The designation "Israel", when used historically, is usually restricted to the time of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel until the exile of the sixth century BCE. At the end of that period the temple in was "Israel's" main institution, and the there of the " of Israel" was the principal unifying bond of the priests and all the people. According to the views of George Foot Moore and of most other scholars there was a shift of emphasis at the beginning of the Second Temple period. l Although there was indeed once again a , the city which was to become the capital of , this temple was no longer regarded as the central institution

* I am gratefully obliged to George F. Brooke, who rewrote this whole article in his excellent English style, and to Devorah Dimant for her editorial help and for much patience. G.F. Moore (1927), p. 3 note 1: "The name Judaism is now generally appropriated to the religion of this period [i.e., from Persian times onwards] and what came after it, in distinction from that of the preceding centuries down to the fall of the (586 B.C.E.), which is called the religion of Israel." THE INSTITUTIONS OF ISRAEL 157 of all "Jewish" people, many of whom were now living in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, or in other places far away from Jerusalem. Instead of the temple, the (the Pentateuch) as revealed to became the new central institution for all those claiming descent from or his twelve sons. And the , where this Torah was read and studied, was to become the principal secondary institution. Ezra as a main representative of the "Great Synagogue" was involved in this process of providing a new orientation, which continues in Judaism right down to the present day. All this forms the traditional view shared by most scholars even now. On the basis of such an understanding the new designation "Judaism" replaces the term "Israel" and marks the shift from the temple to the Pentateuch as the central religious institution or authority. No longer was there a "State of Israel", but rather a new religion based on a book venerated by all "". and Islam are later of this type, religions based on "holy books" revealed to them by their God. In Judaism this shift towards becoming a "religion of a holy book" took place before Christianity started, so the distinction between "Judaism" and the earlier "Israel" is independent of Christian influences, or of scholarly views possibly influenced by Christianity. But when and why did this change actually happen? As far as we know, the first time the designation "yehudim" is used in Palestine by descendants of Jacob, inhabitants of Judaea, is in the second half of the second century BCE, on coins of the Hasmonean rulers2 and in II Maccabees;3 the term is never used there before then.· At the same time we meet the Torat Moshe, or the Pentateuch, as the central authority or main institution within the Essene Qumran community and, perhaps, also within its counter-movement, the .s What had happened to cause the rise of those movements and their specific religious orientation? Under the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes the temple in Jerusalem was defiled and the Torah was suppressed. It is those events that for the first time in history may have caused groups of pious Jewish people to renounce the temple and its defiled cult and to uphold instead the beliefs of their Fathers, established in the Torat Moshe, as their new capital authority. Even though the temple was purified again after the military success of the Maccabees, it had become of secondary significance in yehuda compared with the position that the Torah had gained in the meantime. It was as if the Torah definitely had replaced the temple as God's everlasting dwelling place on earth.

2 See Y. Meshorer (1967), pp. 362, and 119ff. 3 See K.G. Kuhn (1938), pp. 362, and 365. 4 Older evidence of this kind is represented only by the Elephantine·Papyri from the fifth century B.C.E., which are related to "Jews" in Upper· Egypt, not in Palestine, see A. Cowley (1923), Index p. 29Oa, and d . K.G. Kuhn (1938), p. 366, and for hellenistic Jews in Lower and Middle Egypt in the third century B.C.E., see E. Schiirer/G. Vermes et alii, vol. 111.1 (1986), pp. 46f, and 50-52. 5 See H. Stegemann (1987), pp. lSI, and 159-161.