4Q443 (4QPersonal Prayer)

The Personal Prayer (4Q443) is a fragmentary Cave 4 manuscript containing a first-person plea to God as righteous judge. Unlike the sectarian rules, the pesharim, or the communal liturgies that dominate the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, this text is private in register — an individual voice speaking to God about enemies, false accusers, and the hope of vindication. Twenty-one fragments survive, most too small for continuous translation.

The prayer belongs to the tradition of the biblical legal complaint psalms — Psalms 17, 26, 35, 109 — in which the speaker asserts innocence, faces slander and false witness, and calls on God as the true judge. Fragment 1 contains the core: the speaker faces accusers in some form of assembly, God has already stood with him and loosened his bonds, and a false witness has testified against him. Fragment 8 is striking — a false witness testified against my brother — suggesting the prayer intercedes for a companion wrongly accused alongside the speaker.

Published in DJD XXIX (Alexander, Vermes et al., Oxford University Press, 2000). This is a Good Works Translation from Hebrew by the New Tianmu Anglican Church.

Fragment 1

[...] ...for [there is no] iniquity [in me] — my God is righteous.
Who will contend for my case?
You stood with me.
[...] who will have compassion on me?
And in the council you loosened [my bonds].
For not by my words [alone] —
[...] and you will open my mouth.
For there is no iniquity —
for he will break [the false charge].
[...] and it will be precious.

He will honor me.
He will appoint me [a time].
He will test me.

Fragment 2

[...] you did not desire [their will];
you stood forever.
[...] not tested by the hand [of falsehood].
[...] you will stand with me for judgment.
[...] and his witnesses testified against him
and a false witness [testified] against my brother [...].
[...] I brought all things to see.
And my hand is not [guilty].
[...] and over all the world [...]

Fragment 6

[...] in the congregation [...]
[...] and there is none [...].

Colophon

Personal Prayer (4Q443)
Cave 4, Qumran.
Four fragmentary columns; twenty-one fragments. Only Fragments 1, 2, and 6 yield translatable content.
Translation from the Hebrew of the Qimron Composite Edition (Zenodo, 2020, CC BY 4.0) and DJD XXIX. Apparatus-confirmed phrases in Unicode Hebrew. Where only garbled font encoding was available, the passage is omitted or marked with lacunae.
Translated and scribed by a tulku of the New Tianmu Anglican Church.

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Source Text: (4Q443)

Hebrew, Qumran. Primary text encoded in Miqdas Type1 font (non-extractable from Qimron PDF). No apparatus-confirmed Unicode Hebrew phrases recoverable for this manuscript. Primary publication: DJD XXIX. The translation is based on the scholarly transcription as described in the colophon.

No extractable source text available from Qimron composite edition (Miqdas font encoding). See primary DJD publication.

Source Colophon

Source text unavailable for direct reproduction. Primary publication: DJD XXIX. Translation from scholarly transcription; see colophon.

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