When Linguistics and Literarkritik Meet: Revisiting the Periphrastic Participial Construction in the Temple Scroll

This paper will revisit the frequent use of the periphrastic construction of a form of the verb ‮היה‬‎ + participle in the Temple Scroll (TS). As others have noted, TS preserves by far the largest number of cases of this construction in the Qumran corpus, and these cases overwhelmingly involve the yiqṭol of ‮היה‬‎. The use of the construction has also been given compositional weight, serving as a source-critical indicator in prominent theories of the diachronic development of TS. This essay provides a detailed analysis of how the periphrastic construction functions in TS, compares that function to the use of the construction in other Qumran texts, and asks what, if anything, the construction’s distribution might be able to tell us about the processes by which the Temple Scroll was composed.