4QEzekielc (4Q75): The Date of Jerusalem’s Siege

Bedouin located Cave 4 near Khirbet Qumran in 1952, and archaeologists excavated the cave that September. The cave yielded thousands of fragments representing hundreds of manuscripts. Scholars sorted pieces by writing material, handwriting, textual overlap, and physical joins, assigning this Ezekiel manuscript the stable identifier 4Q75. Early Palestine Archaeological Museum photographs documented the fragments, while modern Israel Antiquities Authority multispectral imaging and Qumran-Digital transcription make the surviving lines available for close review. The secure provenance is the Cave 4 corpus. The copyist, owner, route to the cave, and exact circumstances in which the fragment was deposited remain unknown.

4Q75 is a small leather manuscript fragment written in Hebrew. Its surviving words align with Ezekiel 24:2–3, including the command to write down the day and the statement that the king of Babylon had drawn near to Jerusalem, followed by the opening of the cauldron parable. Letter forms and surviving line sequence distinguish it as a separate physical manuscript from 4Q73 and 4Q74. Because so little remains, every visible letter, damaged edge, spacing decision, and editorial reconstruction matters. The fragment should be presented as a direct witness to a short passage, not as a miniature copy of the whole book.

Palaeographic comparison dates the surviving copy to approximately 100–50 BC. That range belongs to the manuscript, not to Ezekiel’s original composition or to the sixth-century BC siege described in the text. Cave 4 belongs to the multilingual literary world of Second Temple Judaism, where multiple copies of prophetic books circulated beside law, prayer, interpretation, calendars, and other writings. The fragment’s presence in the cave fixes its deposit before the Roman-period end of the Qumran manuscript horizon, but it does not identify a sectarian copyist or demonstrate that every Cave 4 scroll had one institutional origin.