The New Jerusalem: Ideal City

Abstract

Aramaic scroll found in the Qumran caves and named by Milik The New I is a detailed description of a temple city designed upon an orthogonal grid of streets, in the tradition of orthogonal cities that began in ancient Egypt and was continued in the Greek Hippodamian cities and the Roman castrum. reconstruction of the scroll that has been published to date is based on two pages (5Q15), which were found in a relatively complete state and were completed by Milik with the aid of another copy of the same scroll that was found in Cave 4 at Qumran and has not been published, and also fragments of the scroll that have been published only in part. In my discussion of the scroll I rely upon Milik's reconstruction and the fragments that have been published except in those cases where Milik notes that his reading is not decisive. text of the scroll in Aramaic and in English translation has been published by Fitzmyer and Harrington,2 and in German by Beyer.3 Greenfield4 proposed several corrections to Milik's reconstruction. An attempt at an architectural reconstruction of the New Jerusalem was made by Licht,5 with whom I disagree in the reconstruction presented here. There are minor differences among the reconstructions of the Aramaic in the various publications. No full and accepted official text of the scroll has as yet been published, so for my present purpose I have chosen the text pub-