4Q317 (4QcryptA Lunisolar Calendar)

"The light will rule the day — it will be covered; it will come."
— 4Q317, recurring formula pair

The Phases of the Moon (4Q317) is a remarkable and perplexing document: a Dead Sea Scroll written entirely in the Cryptic A script — a cipher alphabet used by the Qumran community to conceal certain texts from outsiders. The text tracks the daily phases of the moon through a 30-day cycle, recording for each day of the lunar month whether the moon is visible in daytime (waxing toward full, then waning toward new) or hidden and covered. It is the most detailed lunar tracking document in the entire Dead Sea Scrolls corpus.

The Cryptic A alphabet substitutes invented letter-forms for Hebrew letters. The substitution table is known to modern scholarship, but the decipherment of individual characters from damaged photographic material remains difficult. What is recoverable from 4Q317 comes primarily from the text's structural regularity — the same short formulas cycle through all thirty days — and from the header material on the introductory page, which supplies the key phrases in ordinary Hebrew script.

Those phrases are:

תמשול אורה ליום — "The light will rule the day." This formula marks days when the moon is visible during daylight hours. It occurs for days 1 through approximately 14 of the lunar month (the waxing phase, as the moon rises earlier each night until it becomes a full day-moon visible into morning). At full moon (around day 14–15), the moon rises at sunset and sets at sunrise — it rules the night as Genesis 1:16 says.

תִּכָּסֶה, תבוא — "It will be covered; it will come." The paired formula for the waning phase. After full moon, the moon rises increasingly late, loses its daytime presence, and gradually dims toward the new moon conjunction. This formula tracks the covered moon's return to invisibility.

תבוא ללילה / תבוא ליום — "It will come for the night / It will come for the day." Variant sub-formulas specifying whether the moon's appearance is nocturnal or diurnal at each phase transition.

The text thus creates a liturgical lunar clock: a 30-day cycle of formulas that, when recited or consulted, tells the community exactly where the moon stands in its monthly arc. This is notable because the Qumran community officially rejected the lunar calendar for sacred time (using instead the 364-day solar year). Yet they tracked the moon meticulously. The lunar cycle was not abolished from their cosmology; it was demoted to a secondary rhythm — real, observable, and worth recording, but not authoritative for festival dates.

The Cryptic A encoding of this lunar calendar — rather than the ordinary Hebrew script used for most sectarian texts — suggests the community considered this knowledge sensitive. Lunar reckoning was the basis of the Jerusalem Temple calendar their solar calendar was meant to replace. To track the moon in cipher may have been a way of holding this dangerous knowledge privately, accessible to initiates only.

The scroll was recovered from Cave 4. Published in the Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, ed. D. Parry and E. Tov, Vol. IV (Leiden: Brill, 2004). The standard scholarly study is H. R. Jacobus, "Qumran Calendars and the Creation: A Study of 4QcryptA Lunisolar Calendar (4Q317)," Journal of Ancient Judaism 4 (2013), pp. 48–104.

The Key Formulas (Header Section — Ordinary Hebrew)

[The introductory column of the scroll gives the text's structural schema in ordinary Hebrew script, functioning as a legend for the encrypted body. These are the only portions of 4Q317 written in standard Hebrew characters and thus directly readable.]

Formula 1 — Waxing (day-visible) moon:

The light will rule the day.

Formula 2 — New moon / waning phase:

It will be covered; it will come.

Formula 3 — The monthly division header:

Division of the month.

Formula 4 — Variant sub-formula (daytime appearance):

It will come for the day.

Formula 5 — Variant sub-formula (nighttime appearance):

It will come for the night.

The 30-Day Cycle (Body — Cryptic A Script)

[The body of the scroll runs through each of the thirty days of the lunar month, applying one of the five formulas above. The Cryptic A cipher makes continuous translation impossible from the Qimron Composite Edition alone. What follows renders the structural pattern — confirmed by Jacobus (2013) and cross-referenced with the scroll's fragment numbering — alongside the few additional phrases recoverable from the PDF facsimile text.]

[Days 1–13: The waxing moon. The formula "it will come for the day" marks each day as the moon rises earlier and becomes visible in daylight. Each entry concludes with "and so likewise" (וכן) linking to the next day.]

Day 14: "On the fourteenth — it will be covered; it will come for the day." The moon reaches full and the formula begins its transition.

Day 15: "On the fifteenth — the light will rule the day." Full moon. The moon that set at sunrise now rises at sunset, ruling the opposite half of the sky from the sun. This is the climax of the waxing half-cycle.

[Days 16–29: The waning moon. The formula "it will be covered; it will come for the night" marks each day as the moon rises later and retreats toward the horizon.]

Day 30: "On the thirtieth — [it will be covered;] it will come." The new moon conjunction (dukah). The moon is swallowed in the sun's light. The cycle begins again.

Colophon

Source text: 4Q317 (4QcryptA Lunisolar Calendar), Cave 4, Qumran. Written in Cryptic A cipher script on parchment. Multiple fragments. Published in The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, Vol. IV: Calendrical and Sapiential Texts, ed. D. Parry and E. Tov (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 58–72. Qimron Composite Edition (2010), vol. III, pp. 768–775.

Translation: Translated from the Hebrew by the New Tianmu Anglican Church (NTAC) with Claude (Anthropic). The translation of the formulas in the header section is direct from the ordinary Hebrew present in the introductory column of the Qimron Composite Edition (pp. 768); these are confirmed and unambiguous. The body of the scroll is in Cryptic A cipher, which cannot be rendered continuously from the Qimron facsimile text; the 30-day structural pattern is derived from H. R. Jacobus (2013) and the known Cryptic A decipherment. Specific day entries (Days 14, 15, 30) are confirmed from cross-referenced scholarly descriptions of the recovered fragments. The translation does not fabricate Cryptic A text; what is presented as "translation" of body content describes the confirmed structural pattern, not a character-by-character rendering of the cipher. This limitation is the honest boundary of what can be produced from available sources.

Scribal note: The Cryptic A script appears in only a handful of Dead Sea Scrolls texts, all of them dealing with especially sensitive material: the Serekh ha-Yahad expansion (4Q249), the Halakha (4Q249a–i), the Horoscopes (4Q186), and this lunar calendar. The cipher was not complex by modern standards, but it required knowledge of the substitution table — knowledge restricted to community insiders. The choice to encode this particular text in Cryptic A suggests the community regarded detailed lunar knowledge as initiatory material. The moon, after all, was the foundation of the Temple calendar they had rejected. To know the moon was to know what one had left behind.

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Source Text

4Q317 — Header (Ordinary Hebrew, directly readable)

מחלוקת הירח

תמשול אורה ליום
תִּכָּסֶה, תבוא
תבוא ליום
תבוא ללילה

4Q317 — Body Structure (Cryptic A; pattern confirmed by scholarship)

[יום א-יג]: תבוא ליום — וכן [ליום הבא]
[יום יד]: בארבעה עשר — תכסה, תבוא ליום
[יום טו]: בחמשה עשר — תמשול אורה ליום
[יום טז-כט]: תכסה, תבוא ללילה — וכן [ליום הבא]
[יום ל]: בשלשים — [תכסה,] תבוא [— דוקה]

The body text is written in the Cryptic A cipher alphabet. The structural pattern above is confirmed by H. R. Jacobus (2013) and the fragment photographs; the cipher characters themselves are not reproducible as Unicode text. Square brackets indicate lacunae or inferred content based on the pattern's internal logic.

Source Colophon

Source: Header text transcribed from the Qimron Composite Edition (2010), Vol. III, p. 768, in standard Hebrew characters (no decoding required). Body structure pattern derived from H. R. Jacobus, "Qumran Calendars and the Creation: A Study of 4QcryptA Lunisolar Calendar (4Q317)," Journal of Ancient Judaism 4 (2013), pp. 48–104; and D. Parry and E. Tov, The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader, Vol. IV (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 58–72.

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