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Down Payment. The Temple Scroll is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls (28 ft. 3 in.) and perhaps the most important of the entire collection, Yadin told TIME last week. He first heard about it in 1961 from an anonymous agent representing the dealer in Bethlehem, then inaccessible to Israeli scholars because it was part of Jordan. Even though Yadin did not know exactly what he was buying, he offered to pay $130,000, only to have the agent vanish -along with a down payment of $10,000. After the army officer obtained the scroll in 1967, Yadin negotiated...
Much work remained before the treasure could actually be read. The parchment was fragile and wafer-thin (.0039 in.), and the top edge had disintegrated into a fudgelike mass. Yadin's team froze the scroll to help unpeel it and used infra-red and reverse photography to reconstruct damaged portions...
...soon-to-be-published text, God generally speaks in the first person. The Temple Scroll also uses regular script to record the divine name YHWH, unlike other Qumran texts, which used a distinctive script to remind readers that the name was too sacred to be uttered. This means that the Temple Scroll must have been considered a direct revelation from God, on a level with the Bible itself...
...Essenes repudiated worship at the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem, which they considered corrupt, and scholars have long wondered whether they rejected all temple worship, as the Christians later did. The new scroll shows that temple worship was as central for the Essenes as for other Jews. Indeed, nearly half of the scroll deals with rules that the Essenes thought should have been used to build the temple and worship in it. It calls for a building of three concentric square courts, with twelve outer gates named for the twelve sons of Jacob. It also gives instructions for the surrounding area...
...Temple Scroll also provides the first thorough look at the Halakhah (religious law) of the Essenes. Compared with the orthodox rabbinical thinking that was later codified in the second century Mishnah, the Qumran rules on ritual cleanliness were superstrict. Only the skins of properly slaughtered animals were to be permitted in the temple city. Blind people, as well as the ill and maimed, were barred as unclean. All sexual relations within the temple city were forbidden. One cemetery was to serve four cities since "you shall not follow the customs of the Gentiles who bury their dead everywhere...