Great Psalms Scroll

What Is Actually On It

Bedouin found Cave 11 in 1956, and this scroll was among what came out of it. It was not unrolled until 1961, and what emerged carries twenty-eight incomplete columns, with six or seven lines missing from the foot of every one, on a skin thicker than any other scroll from the caves and possibly calf rather than sheep. The Library of Congress, which exhibited six of those columns, gives the displayed portion as 86 centimetres long and 18.5 high. J. A. Sanders published it in 1965 as the fourth volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. It is the most extensive Psalms manuscript from any of the caves, and Psalms was the most-copied book at Qumran: E. Tov counts thirty-six copies of it there, against twenty-six of Deuteronomy and twenty-one of Isaiah.

Two things about the contents are immediately striking. First, the order is not the Masoretic order. It carries parts of forty-one biblical psalms, chiefly from Psalms 101 to 150, in a sequence that no later Bible follows. Second, it contains material that is not in the Hebrew Bible: Psalm 151, which is in the Greek Septuagint and in Syriac Bibles but not the Hebrew; two further psalms known previously only in Syriac; a Plea for Deliverance; an Apostrophe to Zion; a Hymn to the Creator; a passage from Sirach; and a prose paragraph listing David's compositions and numbering them at 4,050.

Psalter or Prayer Book?

Sanders read the scroll as what it looks like: a genuine edition of the Psalter, still circulating in the first century AD, evidence that the shape of the book was not yet fixed. That reading landed in Jerusalem badly, and the response came fast and in one place. The 1966 volume of Textus carries three articles on the scroll in sequence — Yigael Yadin publishing a further fragment, then Shemaryahu Talmon, then M. H. Goshen-Gottstein under the title "The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and Text." Their case was that this is not a biblical manuscript at all but a secondary liturgical collection, assembled for worship out of a Psalter that already existed — which would account neatly for the rearrangement and for the non-biblical hymns mixed in. P. W. Skehan argued the same in 1973, and P. W. Flint later took Sanders's side, devoting a chapter of his 1997 book to the question under the heading "True Psalter or Secondary Collection?"

The Israel Antiquities Authority's own catalogue records the impasse in its metadata rather than its prose: it classifies the manuscript as "Biblical Compositions?" and its composition type as "Scripture?", question marks included. Punctuation is a thin place to record a scholarly impasse, but it is an honest one.

Two Reasons the Old Argument Has Moved

The first is that the question itself has been challenged. William Yarchin argued in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2015 that the either/or is unfounded: since no standard configuration of the Hebrew Psalter can be shown to have existed in the period, asking whether a Qumran scroll is a true psalter or a secondary collection assumes the very thing that is missing. Presenting the debate as a straight two-sided contest between Sanders and Talmon is now about a decade out of date, and a reader who meets it that way and then reads further will notice.

The second is the date. The Library of Congress, exhibiting the scroll, gives its copying as about AD 30 to 50, from the handwriting. In 2025 the Groningen team that built the Enoch model reported that this manuscript is one of only two in their set whose palaeographic estimate is older than its radiocarbon result — "although there is an overlap with the 14C results", as the same sentence goes on to say — and that the style-based estimate for it comes out "above 100 CE." They print the consequence rather than burying it: that "may go against historical reconstructions according to which the scrolls were hidden in the Qumran caves before the summer of 68 CE." They did not force the model to respect that deadline, and they say why — they wanted to "examine the possibility of style continuation after 70 CE." Nothing here is settled, and a reader is better served knowing that than being handed either side's version as the answer. What is comparatively settled is the wording: across the Qumran Psalms manuscripts the text of the individual psalms is stable to a degree that surprised everyone, and the argument is overwhelmingly about which psalms and in what order rather than about what they say.

Scripture references

• Psalms 145:1-7 — One of the psalms this scroll carries, in a sequence no later Bible follows
• Psalms 101:1-4 — About where the scroll's biblical material is concentrated
• Psalms 119:105 — Included here, as in every Psalter
• Luke 24:44 — Jesus naming "the psalms" as a division of Scripture

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 11Q Psalms (11Q5) — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own record: site "Qumran, Cave 11", material parchment, period Herodian, copy "a". Its classification fields carry the dispute in their punctuation — manuscript type "Biblical Compositions?" and composition type "Scripture?". Official publications given as "Sanders 1965. DJD 4: 1-99" and "Garcia Martinez, Tigchelaar, van der Woude 1998. DJD 23: 28-36"Supports: The cave, period, publication record, and the institution's own hedged classification
• ScholarshipJ. A. Sanders, The Psalms Scroll of Qumrân Cave 11 (11QPsa) — J. A. Sanders · Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), xi + 99 pages and xvii plates — the editio princeps, and the origin of the reading that the scroll is a genuine Psalter. Sanders restated the case for a general readership in The Dead Sea Psalms Scroll (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). Print onlySupports: The first publication and Sanders's own position
• ScholarshipM. H. Goshen-Gottstein, "The Psalms Scroll (11QPsa): A Problem of Canon and Text", and S. Talmon, "Pisqah Be'emsa' Pasuq and 11QPsa" — Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein and Shemaryahu Talmon, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · Textus 5 (1966), 22-33 and 11-21 respectively, alongside Y. Yadin's publication of a further fragment at 1-10; the contents of the volume are listed by the journal's own publisher, the Hebrew University Bible Project. The case that the scroll is a secondary liturgical collection rather than a biblical manuscript. P. W. Skehan argued similarly in "A Liturgical Complex in 11QPsa", Catholic Biblical Quarterly 35 (1973), 195-205. Print onlySupports: The counter-position in section two, and where it was published
• ScholarshipP. W. Flint, "True Psalter or Secondary Collection?" — Peter W. Flint, Trinity Western University · Chapter 11 of The Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms, Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 202-227. The chapter title is the question this article's second section describes, and Flint answers it on Sanders's side; his chapter 10, "David's Solar Psalter: The Structure and Provenance of 11QPsa" (172-201), sets out the case · paywalledSupports: That Flint took Sanders's side, in his own publication
• ScholarshipWilliam Yarchin, "Were the Psalms Collections at Qumran True Psalters?" — William Yarchin, Azusa Pacific University · Journal of Biblical Literature 134:4 (2015), 775-789. Argues that because no standard configuration of the premodern Hebrew Psalter can be shown to have existed, the question whether a Qumran scroll is a true psalter or a secondary collection has no basis in the manuscript evidence · paywalledSupports: The argument in section three that the old two-sided framing is unfounded
• ScholarshipM. Popović, M. A. Dhali, L. Schomaker et al., "Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis" — Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker and colleagues, University of Groningen · PLOS ONE 20:6 (2025), e0323185. Open access, read in full. Reports that "Only 4Q201 and 11Q5 have older palaeographic date estimates, although there is an overlap with the 14C results" — the concessive clause is theirs and is kept here — that for 11Q5 "a fairly certain style-based date estimate above 100 CE can also be achieved", that this "may go against historical reconstructions according to which the scrolls were hidden in the Qumran caves before the summer of 68 CE", and that they nonetheless "did not impose here a chronological limit on the model", in order to "examine the possibility of style continuation after 70 CE"Supports: The dating tension in section three
• ReferenceLibrary of Congress and the Israel Antiquities Authority, "Scrolls from the Dead Sea": the Psalms Scroll — Library of Congress, with the Israel Antiquities Authority · The exhibition's own object caption: "Copied ca. 30 - 50 C.E.", "Height 18.5 cm ... length 86 cm", "Courtesy of the Israel Antiquties Authority" [sic], "parts of forty-one biblical psalms (chiefly form chapters 101-50), in non-canonical sequence", "found in 1956 in Cave 11 and unrolled in 1961", twenty-eight incomplete columns with "six to seven lines ... lacking at the bottom of each", and the Tetragrammaton "written in the paleo-Hebrew script". Read at a long-standing mirror of the exhibition; the Library of Congress's own object pages for it no longer resolveSupports: The dimensions, date of copying, contents, unrolling, column state and custody
• ScholarshipE. Tov, "The Text of Isaiah at Qumran" — E. Tov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem · In Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran: Collected Essays (TSAJ 121; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 42-56; the author's own copy is freely readable. Opens by counting the copies at Qumran: twenty-one of Isaiah, "Deuteronomy, of which twenty-six copies are known, and Psalms with thirty-six copies"Supports: That Psalms was the most-copied book among the Qumran manuscripts
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Great Psalms Scroll

Further reading

• The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 11Q Psalms
• Library of Congress: Scrolls from the Dead Sea — the Psalms Scroll
• Wikipedia: Great Psalms Scroll

Reflect

The people who copied this scroll prayed the psalms in an order no Bible now prints. Does the order you read them in change what they do to you?