He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things.
Cave 4 Hebrew. Single fragment, ten partially preserved lines. DJD XXXVI (Pfann, Kister et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXVIII, Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 193–200. Qimron composite edition, p. 193.
4Q248 is a brief historical narrative — apparently a prose account of the Seleucid king's Egypt campaigns — written in language that consciously echoes Daniel 11's portrait of the "king who exalts himself." The fragment describes: the siege of a city in Egypt, soldiers driven out, the selling of land, the taking of the temple city with its treasuries, the king's rampage through the lands of the nations, and the ultimate fate involving Israel. Two phrases confirmed in the apparatus are direct Daniel 11 allusions: Daniel 11:36 (the king who exalts himself above every god and speaks astonishing things) and Daniel 11:39 (the dividing of land for a price). The most likely referent is Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his 169 BCE Egypt campaign.
The text is closely related to the Pesharim tradition and the Danielic historical schematism. It differs from the pesharim in that it appears to be historical narration rather than scriptural commentary — a raw account of Seleucid military action cast in Danielic vocabulary.
Fragment — The Egypt Campaign
(Ten partially preserved lines. Primary text in Miqdas Type1 font — not extractable from available PDF edition. The following reconstructs from apparatus cross-references and confirmed apparatus vocabulary. All material not attested in Unicode apparatus is marked uncertain.)
[...] leaders [...]
[...] the God of gods [...] and then they ate [...]
[...] in the flesh of [...] and children [...] in a siege in their city [...]
[...] breaking [...] and their officers [...] from there [...]
[...] he returned to Egypt, and sold the land [...]
[...] and he seized the city of the sanctuary with all its treasuries [...]
[...] and he turned in the lands of the nations [...] and at their completion [...]
[...] to stretch out the hand against all [...] and their end [...]
[...] all these [...] Israel [...]
Apparatus — Confirmed Cross-References
The following are confirmed from the apparatus (RamatGan Unicode font in Qimron edition), showing the Daniel allusions that anchor the text's historical identification:
Line 3 apparatus: ויתרומם ויגדל על כל ועל אל אלים ידבר נפלאות
He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak astonishing things. (Daniel 11:36)
Line 6–7 apparatus: ואדמה יחלק במחיר
And land he shall divide for a price. (Daniel 11:39)
Colophon
Translated from Hebrew (4Q248) by a Good Works tulku under the auspices of the New Tianmu Anglican Church. Source: Qimron composite edition, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings (Zenodo, CC BY 4.0), p. 193. The primary text uses Miqdas Type1 font encoding, which cannot be decoded from the PDF; translation is based on apparatus cross-references (Unicode) and the contextual reconstruction of the historical narrative from those references. The two confirmed Daniel citations are verbatim apparatus quotations. All line-by-line reconstruction is uncertain and marked as such. Compiled March 2026.
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