4QWords of Ezekiel and the Dry Bones

The fragments were found among the Cave 4 corpus and initially published under overlapping labels that also included material later separated as Pseudo-Moses and an Apocryphon of Jeremiah. Devorah Dimant established much of the literary identification, but recent work by Anna Shirav reexamines parchment, margins, orthography, deterioration patterns, and repeated passages using the Stegemann method and digital tools. Her reconstruction proposes that 4Q385’s accelerating-time, chariot, and resurrection fragments occur in that order and treats 4Q385b as a possible replacement sheet near the beginning. The IAA catalog’s broad title ‘Multiple Compositions’ honestly reflects the difficult publication history. The modern dossier must not imply that one intact titled scroll was discovered.

What survives is a set of brown parchment fragments in late Hasmonean or early Herodian Hebrew hands. 4Q386 fragment 1 preserves portions of three consecutive columns and provides an anchor for arranging parallels. The resurrection passage appears in overlapping witnesses: 4Q385 fragments 2-3, 4Q386 1 i, and 4Q388 7. Unlike biblical Ezekiel, the work frames the scene as Ezekiel’s question about the righteous dead and describes bodily restoration in its own sequence before breath enters them. Another fragment reuses the merkabah vision. Because manuscripts and compositions were once conflated, signum, physical sheet, literary work, and reconstructed episode must be kept distinct in any presentation.

The represented copies span approximately the late Hasmonean to early Herodian periods, around the first century BC into the early first century AD, based on paleography. The composition could predate these copies. During this era Jewish texts explored resurrection, final judgment, restored Israel, and temple hope in varied forms. Ezekiel 37 itself explains the bones as the whole house of Israel returning from national death and exile; Words of Ezekiel makes individual or collective resurrection of the righteous more explicit. That development belongs to the history of interpretation, but the fragments do not show that the biblical chapter originally meant only bodily resurrection or that all Jewish groups shared this reading.