(c) Images Courtesy of the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. Photo, Shai Halevi. www.deadseascrolls.org.il

Eleven manuscripts containing text from the Book of Numbers have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls—eight from Qumran, two from Naḥal Ḥever, and one from Wadi Murabbaʿat. Together, these copies preserve portions of nearly every chapter in Numbers, with only two of the book’s 30 chapters unrepresented.

The scroll before you is the best-preserved copy of Numbers from the Dead Sea collection. It contains portions of the latter two-thirds of the book, though its fragmentary condition tells the story of its survival: only 1,528 words remain fully or partially legible—just 9% of the complete Book of Numbers.

Despite its deteriorated state, this manuscript reveals the scribe’s remarkable skill and distinctive practices. A unique feature appears in the formatting: the right margin of each sheet’s first column is marked by two vertical lines rather than the single line typical of other scrolls. The scribe’s expertise is evident in the careful adherence to guiding lines throughout the text. In the entire preserved portion, the writing strays beyond the lines only once.

While scholars initially dated this scroll to the first century BCE, recent radiocarbon analysis suggests it was actually copied earlier, in the second century BCE—making it one of the oldest biblical manuscripts discovered.

Detail Translation

[18] 30 [Therefore you shall say to them,] ‘When you offer the best of it, then the rest shall be reckoned to you as your offering as the produce of the threshing floor, and as the produce] from the wine press.

31 And you shall eat them in every place, you and you[r] households; [for it is your reward] in return for your service in the tent of meeting.

32 And you shall bear no sin because of it, [when you have offered some of the best] from it; and you shall not profane the holy gifts of the Israelites, lest you die.

[19] 1 Now the Lord sPoke to them and to Aaron, saying,

2 “T[h]is is the statute of [the law which] the Lord [has commanded,] saying, ‘Tell the Israelites to bring you an [unblemished red] heifer, in [which] is no defect, and on which no yoke has been laid.

[xxx] = restoration of missing text based on other versions of the same text or scholarly research

LORD = the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Bible