Investigation: Ecclesiastes at Qumran

In 1952 Bedouin and archaeologists recovered thousands of scroll fragments from Cave 4 near Qumran. Among them were pieces of two copies of Ecclesiastes. James Muilenburg published 4Q109 in 1954, noting the early form of its letters; the full edition of both appeared in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XVI (2000).

Small as they are, these fragments show that Ecclesiastes was being copied in Hebrew, in a form close to the later Masoretic Text, within about a century or two of when most scholars think it was written.

What "reported" means

The site has not yet compared the fragments' letters with the DJD XVI edition and the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library photographs. Until it does, ranges and dates are given as reported by scholarly catalogues, and any claimed difference from the Masoretic Text is not printed as a verified reading.

What the fragments can and cannot show

They show that a Hebrew text of Ecclesiastes close to the Masoretic Text existed in the 2nd century BC. A manuscript's copying date is not a composition date; an early copy makes very late dates (e.g. the Maccabean period) impossible, but cannot decide between the 5th and the 3rd century. Nothing in them bears on authorship.

The 1:14 claim

One survey reports that 4Q110 has additional words after 1:14a. Such a claim needs a secure reading of a damaged fragment. The site will report it only after collation against DJD XVI and the images, with the uncertainty of each letter marked.

Ecclesiastes among the Writings at Qumran

The number of Qumran copies gives a rough sense of what was read there: Psalms (about 36 manuscripts), Daniel (8), Job (4 Hebrew, plus Aramaic Targums), Ruth (4), Song of Songs (4), Lamentations (4), Proverbs (2), Ecclesiastes (2), Esther (none). Two copies is few, but numbers of fragments depend partly on the chance of survival.

How a script is dated

Palaeography dates a manuscript by the shapes of its letters, compared with dated documents and inscriptions. Frank Moore Cross's typology of Jewish scripts is the standard framework. Palaeographic dates usually carry a margin of several decades; radiocarbon tests have been run on some Dead Sea Scrolls but, as far as the site knows, not on the Ecclesiastes fragments (C check).