A Newly Reconstructed Calendrical Scroll from Qumran in Cryptic Script

In this article we offer a reconstruction and edition of one of the last unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls. It is an extremely fragmentary calendrical scroll written in the Cryptic A code. While images of 4Q324d were included in the DJD series, no formal edition of it exists. The suggested jigsaw-puzzlelike reconstruction integrates forty-two extremely small fragments into a stretch of five consecutive columns of what we consider to be one continuous scroll (pace earlier preliminary editions). In terms of its content, the calendar contained in this scroll resembles the one found at the top of 4Q394 3–7 (a copy of 4QMMT) and in 4Q394 1–2. An intriguing interlinear gloss in both shape and content offers a ruling on the Festival of Wood Offering that follows the halakic rulings of the Temple Scroll.