The Utopian Vision of the Temple Scroll

Abstract

Although the Temple Scroll’s divinely-commanded temple plan has frequently been described as “utopian,” there has been no sustained attempt to analyze the scroll in light of other texts that have been described as utopias/utopian, or in connection with utopian studies. This article aims to start that conversation, considering what insights about the purpose and function of the Temple Scroll might be gained from approaching it as a utopia. Such an approach demonstrates that the scroll’s temple is best understood not as a concrete plan for direct reform, but as an imagined counterfactual world, constituted through legal discourse, through which the composers sought to reflect on and respond to their current realities.