His glory fills all the earth from one end to the other, the waters.
— 4Q462

A Cave 4 Hebrew manuscript (4Q462), one of a series of brief narrative compositions found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text meditates on Israel's history in Egypt, the covenantal inheritance given to Jacob, and the movement from darkness to light — a theology of redemption cast in creation-language. The work is fragmentary, preserving approximately eleven readable lines from a single column.

In Second Temple literature, Ham is the biblical ancestor of Egypt (Genesis 10:6; Psalm 105:23, "the land of Ham"). The text opens with his territories before pivoting to the covenantal inheritance given to Jacob. Cush — another son of Ham — is placed geographically to frame the scene. Against this backdrop the narrator speaks in the collective first person of an Israel that "went empty," stripped of possessions, before the covenant memory reasserts itself.

The closing movement — "the light was alone; darkness was with them; the light came and darkness ended" — draws on both the Exodus plague of darkness (Exodus 10:21–23) and the creation language of Genesis 1:3–4. This dualistic register is characteristic of Qumranic thought (cf. the Rule of the Community's Two Spirits teaching, 1QS III–IV), though the text does not use the technical sectarian vocabulary. It may reflect a liturgical meditation on redemption history rather than a strictly sectarian composition.

Fragment 1 — The Covenant over Ham's Land

[...] Ham [...] in their territories [...] for a light to Jacob [...] he remembered [...]

[...] and he gave his covenant, the inheritance [of ...] to Israel [...] Cush is there [...]

[...] We went empty; our possessions [...] given to Jacob as servants [...]

[...] as an inheritance to many [...] and he ruled from the earth [...]

Fragment 2 — Light Over Darkness

[...] his glory fills all the earth from one end to the other — the waters [...]

[...] to Israel [...] and over us — the light was with them; darkness was alone [...]

[...] the light came and darkness ended [...] and they ruled [...]

[...] forever [...]

Colophon

Translated by the New Tianmu Anglican Church from the Hebrew.

Manuscript: 4Q462 (Cave 4 Narrative C), a single-column Hebrew manuscript from Qumran. Preserved in approximately eleven legible lines.

Source: Elisha Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2010). Available under CC BY 4.0 on Zenodo. Hebrew decoded from Miqdas/MiqdasXalul font encoding.

Lacunae: Lacunae (gaps in the surviving text) are indicated by [...]. Several lines are too damaged for continuous translation; vocabulary only has been noted where recoverable. The translator has not filled gaps with reconstructed content.

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