4QPaleoExodus m
4Q22 is the longest surviving pre-Samaritan Exodus manuscript: a paleo-Hebrew scroll that expands and coordinates Torah passages, revealing textual plurality before the specifically Samaritan form was fully defined.
- Artifact date
- Ancient Near Eastern or Second Temple period; see cited catalog
- Findspot
- See cited institutional catalog
What archaeologists can actually examine
4Q22, designated 4QpaleoExodus m, is an extensive though fragmentary Hebrew Exodus scroll from Qumran Cave 4. It is written in paleo-Hebrew script and preserves portions across much of Exodus, including legal and narrative passages. Its text contains harmonizing additions and rearrangements closely related to the textual tradition later represented by the Samaritan Pentateuch. Because these expansions usually draw language from elsewhere in the Pentateuch, the manuscript shows a scribal effort to coordinate parallel speeches and events. Scholars therefore call it pre-Samaritan: it shares the tradition’s major editorial traits but should not be assumed to be a sectarian Samaritan artifact. Its existence demonstrates ancient Pentateuchal plurality while preserving a recognizably Exodus-shaped composition.
The longest pre-Samaritan Exodus witness
Enough fragments survive to reveal extensive harmonizing and coordinating features across the book.
Paleo-Hebrew is an archaizing script choice
Ancient-looking letters distinguish the Torah scroll but do not date it to the Exodus or monarchy.
Expansions reuse Pentateuchal language
Many longer readings bring commands, fulfillment notices, and parallel legal formulations into closer agreement.
Pre-Samaritan is not simply Samaritan
Shared textual features predate or stand apart from the later community-specific Gerizim formulation.
Material reconstruction remains active
The debated Gerizim composition shows how fragment placement and estimated column space affect textual history.
Follow the evidence from discovery to debate
Move through the find in a deliberate order: establish its provenance, examine the surviving object, place it in time, and then weigh the scholarly interpretation.
How the find came to light
The fragments belong to the vast Cave 4 corpus discovered in 1952 and reconstructed from thousands of pieces after excavation and antiquities-market recovery. Editors grouped 4Q22 by its distinctive paleo-Hebrew hand, leather, recurring textual sequence, and physical joins. Patrick Skehan began work on paleo-Hebrew biblical manuscripts, and Eugene Ulrich and Judith Sanderson completed the authoritative edition in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert IX. The Israel Antiquities Authority now catalogs the manuscript across numerous plates and legacy infrared photographs, allowing dispersed pieces to be inspected together digitally. Recent scholarship still revises material reconstruction—for example, reassessing whether the Gerizim composition belonged to the scroll—showing that publication does not end the physical and textual investigation of a fragmentary object.
What you are looking at
4Q22 consisted of leather sheets ruled for columns and inscribed in an archaizing paleo-Hebrew alphabet rather than the square script common in most Qumran Hebrew manuscripts. Many fragments are small, but enough text survives or can be placed to reconstruct extensive portions of Exodus. The script choice gave the Torah a visually ancient appearance; it does not mean the manuscript was copied in the Iron Age. Textual expansions often repeat a divine instruction at the point where Moses carries it out, or import a parallel Deuteronomic formulation to make narrative and law more explicit. Damage, separated fragments, uncertain joins, and estimated column widths mean that proposed missing content must be distinguished from actual ink. The scroll’s textual profile emerges cumulatively, not from one sensational variant.
Where it belongs in history
Palaeography generally places the copy in the late second or first century BCE, within the Hasmonean-era manuscript culture represented at Qumran. Its paleo-Hebrew letters revive an older national script that continued to carry special associations for Torah, coins, and identity. The text belongs to a period before the later Masoretic and Samaritan Pentateuchal forms became the exclusive communal standards familiar today. “Pre-Samaritan” describes literary features shared with the Samaritan Pentateuch before its explicitly Samaritan ideological layer; it does not locate the scribe on Mount Gerizim or identify a Samaritan owner. The cave context shows preservation near Qumran, but not necessarily composition or copying by the settlement’s sectarian community.
Consensus, questions, and debate
There is broad agreement that 4Q22 is the fullest pre-Samaritan manuscript from Qumran and that it preserves most major expansions shared with Samaritan Exodus. Scholars distinguish those harmonistic features from the Samaritan Pentateuch’s sectarian identification of Mount Gerizim. Earlier reconstructions argued that the explicitly Gerizim-centered tenth-commandment composition did not fit the scroll; Hila Dayfani’s material and textual reconstruction contends that a Gerizim composition was present while still belonging to the pre-Samaritan stage. The issue affects models of when and how this tradition acquired its final form. Terminology also matters: “pre-Samaritan” marks relationship, not a simple ancestor-descendant line, and individual readings may agree with Masoretic, Greek, or otherwise independent witnesses.
The biblical record beside the artifact
Exodus 20:1–17 is the primary passage because 4Q22 participates in the textual history of the Decalogue and the Sinai narrative. More broadly, preserved and reconstructed sections illuminate Exodus’s plagues, departure, wilderness instruction, covenant law, and sanctuary materials. The scroll’s harmonizations show ancient readers coordinating commands with their fulfillment and Exodus with related Deuteronomy passages. A debated Gerizim-related composition bears directly on how the Decalogue and chosen-place traditions developed. Yet the manuscript does not corroborate the exodus event as archaeology, identify a Mosaic autograph, or show that its longer readings are all original. Its strongest biblical connection is to the transmission and interpretive shaping of Exodus in late Second Temple Judaism.
Exodus 20:1–17
1And God spake all these words, saying,
2I [am] the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
4Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth:
5Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me;
6And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
7Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
8Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10But the seventh day [is] the sabbath of the LORD thy God: [in it] thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that [is] within thy gates:
11For [in] six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them [is], and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
12¶ Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
13Thou shalt not kill.
14Thou shalt not commit adultery.
15Thou shalt not steal.
16Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
17Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.
A responsible historical conclusion
4Q22 shows that biblical preservation could include interpretive coordination. Its copyist transmitted Exodus in a form that clarified repeated speeches and aligned related laws, apparently regarding the expanded result as Scripture rather than commentary outside it. That challenges a modern assumption that ancient manuscript differences must be either careless corruption or wholesale rewriting. The scroll also prevents the Samaritan Pentateuch from being treated as a late isolated curiosity: many characteristic readings existed in Jewish manuscript culture before the later communal divide was complete. At the same time, the recognizable narrative and legal backbone of Exodus persists. The artifact therefore supplies concrete evidence for both continuity and literary development within the Torah’s ancient textual history.
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
4Q22 – 4Q paleoExodus m
Israel Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital LibraryOfficial fragment and image catalogue for the exact Cave 4 paleo-Hebrew Exodus manuscript.
Qumran Cave 4 VII: Genesis to Numbers
Oxford University Press / Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIIAuthoritative critical edition for 4Q22’s transcription, reconstruction, script, variants, and pre-Samaritan profile.
4QpaleoExodus m and the Gerizim Composition
Journal of Biblical Literature / University of HaifaPeer-reviewed material and textual reassessment arguing that the Gerizim composition belonged to this pre-Samaritan scroll.
The Samaritan and Jewish Versions of the Pentateuch: A Survey
ReligionsOpen scholarly synthesis comparing 4Q22 with Masoretic, Greek, and Samaritan forms and clarifying the pre-Samaritan designation.