4QIsaiahᵇ (4Q56): A Broad Fragmentary Isaiah Witness

The parchment fragments were recovered from Cave 4 and sorted among an enormous body of manuscript debris after 1952. Scholars identified Isaiah by aligning surviving words with the book and grouped pieces by the same hand, material, and layout. The manuscript received the siglum 4QIsaiahᵇ and inventory number 4Q56 in the official publication sequence. That name creates recurring confusion with 'Isaiah Scroll B,' a label sometimes used for 1QIsaiahᵇ; the objects come from different caves and have different catalog numbers. The Israel Antiquities Authority now provides a unified manuscript record and fragment images for 4Q56.

The object is a collection of brown parchment fragments written in Hebrew square script, not a displayable continuous scroll. Some pieces preserve multiple adjacent lines; many retain only short sequences at torn edges. The distribution of identifiable text spans early judgment oracles, historical narratives, consolation material, servant poetry, and final restoration passages. Surviving ink at Isaiah 53 includes the end of the servant passage; Isaiah 61 preserves the proclamation of good news and release. Reconstructed editions combine visible letters with supplied text in brackets. Readers should therefore distinguish the manuscript's broad book coverage from the much smaller amount of parchment actually extant at any one passage.

Letter forms are usually assigned to the late Hasmonean or early Herodian period, around the first century BC. The copy belongs among roughly twenty Isaiah manuscripts from the Qumran caves, an unusually rich level of attestation that suggests sustained copying and interpretation. Its text offers a counterweight to treating the Great Isaiah Scroll as though it were the only ancient Hebrew Isaiah. The manuscript predates the complete medieval Masoretic codices by about a millennium, but palaeography supplies a range rather than a year, and neither the copyist's identity nor the place of manufacture is known.