The Temple Scroll, 4QMMT and the Thanksgiving Hymns

**The Temple Scroll (11Q19).** At over eight metres it is the longest scroll found at Qumran, and the most audacious: God speaks in the first person throughout, rewriting the laws of Deuteronomy as direct divine speech. It lays out an ideal temple on a scale never built, with three vast concentric courts, and imposes purity rules far stricter than the Torah requires — latrines placed three thousand cubits from the city, a ban on sexual relations within the holy city, an expanded law of the king. It is a blueprint for a Jerusalem that does not exist, written by people convinced the existing one was defiled. **4QMMT (Some of the Works of the Law).** A letter, apparently from the community''s leadership to a Jerusalem authority, listing about twenty points of legal disagreement — purity of liquid streams, the status of certain offerings, intermarriage of priests. It closes: *"we have written to you some of the works of the Law ... and it shall be reckoned to you as righteousness, in that you have done what is upright and good before Him."* **The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns, 1QH).** Around thirty psalms of praise in the first person, and their note is not triumph but wretchedness answered by mercy: the speaker is a creature of clay and kneaded dust, a vessel of unclean lips, who knows that righteousness belongs to God alone and that he stands only by grace and forgiveness. **Where they stand.** All three are sectarian compositions, in no canon.

4QMMT is the most important single scroll for New Testament study, because it supplies the missing half of an argument. Paul says a man is not justified by "works of the law" (Galatians 2:16; Romans 3:20, 28), and for centuries the phrase was read as meaning moral effort in general. Here is that exact phrase — *ma''asei ha-torah* — in a Hebrew letter written before Paul, and it means specific legal observances that mark out the true community, followed by the promise that doing them "shall be reckoned to you as righteousness." Paul is answering a real position held by real people, and quite possibly a stock phrase. That does not overturn the Reformation reading so much as sharpen it. The works Paul rejects are precisely the boundary-markers that tell you who is inside the covenant — and he rejects them as the ground of righteousness because righteousness is reckoned through faith in Christ, exactly the language 4QMMT applies to legal obedience. The Hodayot cut the other way, and are the more moving discovery. Long before Paul, a Jewish writer could say that man is dust, that no one is righteous before God, and that pardon comes from mercy alone. The grammar of grace was already there. What was not there was the crucified Messiah in whom that mercy is grounded. The Temple Scroll, meanwhile, shows a movement so convinced that the sanctuary was defiled that it designed a new one. The New Testament answers the same longing differently: the temple is a man (John 2:19–21), and then a people (1 Corinthians 3:16). Modern translations are under copyright; Berean quotes briefly and links to the published editions.

• Galatians 2:16— Not justified by the works of the law — the phrase found in 4QMMT
• Romans 3:20-28— By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified
• John 2:19-21— He spoke of the temple of his body
• 1 Corinthians 3:16-17— You are the temple of God

• ·Yigael Yadin, 'The Temple Scroll', 3 vols. (Israel Exploration Society, 1983)
• ·Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, 'Qumran Cave 4.V: Miqsat Ma''ase Ha-Torah' (DJD X, Oxford, 1994)
• ·Carol A. Newsom, 'The Self as Symbolic Space: Constructing Identity and Community at Qumran' (Brill, 2004)
• ·N.T. Wright, 'Paul and the Faithfulness of God' (Fortress Press, 2013)
• ·The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

• Manuscripts

  The Community Rule (1QS)

  The community behind the letter