ברכת המאורות (4Q408)
The Liturgy of Luminaries — 4Q408, discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran — is a liturgical blessing for the daily cycle of light and darkness, one of the most explicitly cosmological prayer texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus. Its central act is to sanctify the boundary between day and night (בין יום ללילה) as a divinely ordained division, echoing the creation narrative of Genesis 1:3–5 and applying it to the daily prayer life of the community.
The text blesses God as the Creator of the luminaries (יוצר המאורות), who set the great light to rule by day and the darkness to rule at the boundary of night. It echoes Genesis 1:4 — "God saw that the light was good" — and frames the twice-daily moment of dawn and dusk as liturgically charged: the community's blessing of God's holy name at the moment when light crosses into darkness.
The manuscript is severely damaged. Only a continuous section of eleven lines can be translated; the remainder yields vocabulary only. The text is published in DJD XXXVI (Brooke et al., 2000). The 1Q29 fragment on the same page of the Qimron composite shares vocabulary — "Blessed are you, Lord" (ברוך אתה יהוה) — suggesting a related liturgical tradition of prophetic ratification.
This is a Good Works Translation by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, translated directly from the Hebrew of 4Q408.
The Blessing of the Luminaries
These are the words [to be spoken] to all Israel:
[Praise God who made] the heavens and stretched out the firmament,
who appointed the luminaries to govern between day and night.
He who created the great light to rule the day at its boundary,
and darkness at the boundary of night —
he created it as a boundary.
Bless his holy name at your creation:
because he brought forth the luminaries into the expanse of heaven
and their glory shines forth from his lofty dwelling.
[And bless the Lord, all who...]
[...the luminaries,] for the light was good.
Blessed are you, Creator,
who set the evening at its boundary,
who created darkness at the boundary of night.
[Bless] your holy name,
and bless your words for your faithful ones —
to bring out the evening light
and to distinguish between day and night.
[...to go out, so that the children of Adam may know]
[...] these glorious works of yours.
Fragment — Companion Blessing (1Q29)
A related liturgical fragment from 1Q29 preserves the ratification formula:
And Israel said:
"Blessed are you, Lord —
you are righteous in all your ways,
glorious in your great strength."
Amen.
Colophon
Liturgy of Luminaries (4Q408) is preserved in approximately eleven legible lines from a Cave 4 Hebrew manuscript. Published in George Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4, XXVI, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XXXVI (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000). Composite text per Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew and Aramaic Texts (2010), pp. 607–608. The companion 1Q29 fragment (DJD I, pp. 130–132, from Cave 1) shares vocabulary with 4Q408 and is incorporated here as a coda; 1Q29 is the basis for the Liturgy of the Three Tongues of Fire, separately archived. Psalm lemmas and Genesis echoes translated from the Masoretic Text. This is a Good Works Translation by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Translated from the Hebrew of 4Q408 by the Tulku lineage.
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