Temple Scroll

One of the Dead Sea scrolls contains descriptions that are very close to what appear in the Book of Ezekiel. Now referred to as the "Temple Scroll", it is a pre-Herodian Hebrew document with plans for a Jewish temple.

Badly damaged, it contains spurts of dimensions and architectural information that soon drop off. Even so, it is evident from the Temple Scroll that its shrine was also 20 x 20 cubits on plan:

Column four reads:

…emerge to…are wide four…and a terrace is between the…the sixth, a terrace…the width.  And the height of the…And you shall build the porch…ten cubits.  And the walls…and height sixty cubits…twelve cubits…twenty-one cubits…twenty cubits square…its half. 

Though this appears confusing there is only one thing that is sixty cubits high: the temple.  And only one thing within the temple that is twenty cubits square: the inner shrine, called the Holy of Holies.

This simply confirms the likelihood that the foundation of the Jerusalem Temple remained the same despite its many reconstructions and appearances in Hebrew literature. While the height changed at times, the ground plan did not. The plan is the real foundation of the edifice and if the ground plan stayed the same, the foundation may be said to have symbolically done so as well.