"...bearing the oath... their iniquities..."
— 3Q9, Fragment 2

3Q9 — Cave 3 Hebrew Fragment — Dead Sea Scrolls

3Q9 is a tiny Cave 3 fragment classified by Qimron as Dibré Joshua (Words of Joshua / DibJos) — the same tradition as the Apocryphon of Joshua (4Q378–379), which expands the narratives of the book of Joshua in the rhetorical register of Mosaic pseudepigrapha. Published in DJD III (Baillet, Milik, de Vaux, 1962), p. 100–101. The fragment is extremely lacunose; only two of its three fragments yield translatable content.

What survives belongs to the theological vocabulary of covenant accountability: oath-bearing, communal iniquity, and the death that follows from transgression. The phrase bearing the oath (נֹשֵׂא אָלָה) draws directly on 1 Kings 8:31, where Solomon asks God to execute judgment when a person swears an oath before the sanctuary altar — the sanctuary as the site where the covenant's binding force is both invoked and resolved. The companion phrase their iniquities (נַעֲוֹתָם) represents the community standing under the weight of accumulated covenant failure. The term carries the sense of things bent or twisted — a life that has gone crooked from the right way.

Fragment 3's two recoverable phrases are harder to separate cleanly from their lacunae, but their register is consistent. Death of transgression (מוֹת פֶּשַׁע) — whether read as "the death that transgression brings" or "the dying one whose sin is transgression" — places this text in the tradition of covenant consequence: to break the oath is to die. The final recoverable phrase, oath [and] torn piece (אָלָה פַּת), invokes the evidentiary procedure of Exodus 22:13: when an animal entrusted to a keeper is torn by a wild beast, the keeper brings the torn piece as proof. Applied to covenant oath, the image is striking — the torn fragment itself becomes evidence, the remnant of what the oath cost.

In a Joshua context, these terms most naturally evoke the Achan narrative (Joshua 7): Achan violated the sacred ban (ḥerem), bore its consequence, and died because of his transgression. His family and goods were destroyed; the violated oath was avenged. The community reading this text at Qumran would have recognized their own situation — a people under oath, carrying the weight of ancestral and communal iniquity, living in the shadow of what transgression costs.

Fragment 1

This fragment (4 lines) is entirely lacunose. No content survives for translation.

Fragment 2

[...]
[...] bearing the oath [...]
[...] their iniquities [...]

Fragment 3

[...]
[...] death of transgression [...]
[...] oath, torn piece [...]
[...] in his behalf [...]

Colophon

Translated from the Hebrew (3Q9) by the New Tianmu Anglican Church (NTAC). Source: Elisha Qimron, The Dead Sea Scrolls — The Hebrew Writings, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2010), pp. 100–101, with reference to DJD III (Baillet, Milik, de Vaux; Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Classified as Dibré Joshua (DibJos). Scribal credit: Tulku of the Dead Sea Scrolls lineage, Mar 2026. Translation from the Hebrew. Gaps indicated by [...]. Lacunae not filled.

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