4Q303–305
"Hear, O peoples; consider his works of wonder — from above he stilled the waters."
— 4Q303, Fragment 1
The Meditation on Creation (4Q303–305) is a fragmentary Qumran wisdom text that takes the Genesis creation narrative as its subject — not to retell it, but to meditate on it. The text addresses its audience as "peoples," an unusual apostrophe in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus, suggesting a teaching or proclamatory context. What follows is a reflection on the primordial act: God stilling the chaotic waters, the tohu and bohu of Genesis 1:2, the giving of dominion to humanity, the creation of woman from man's rib.
The text survives in three overlapping Cave 4 manuscripts: 4Q303, 4Q304, and 4Q305. All three are highly fragmentary. The 4Q303 manuscript preserves the most legible sequence: eleven lines of a single column, covering the opening address through the creation of woman. 4Q304 preserves three fragmentary lines that appear to continue the creation theme ("and the earth... the darkness... he made"). 4Q305 overlaps with 4Q303 in content.
What is theologically notable is the text's use of Genesis 1:2 — the tohu va-bohu — as a pivot point. The meditation does not begin at the first day of creation but at the primordial void, the moment before ordering. God's first act is the stilling of chaos: "from above he stilled the waters." Everything that follows — dominion, human intelligence, the creation of woman — grows from that act of founding order. The Genesis narrative becomes a sequence of gifts: rulership to humanity, wisdom for good and evil, a helper from the self. The meditation ends, as Genesis 2 ends, with the first human pair.
Published by Torleif Elgvin, Moshe Kister, and colleagues in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XX: Qumran Cave 4, Sapiential Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
Fragment 1 (4Q303, Lines 1–11)
[Only the broadest outlines of the column's left and right margins survive; lacunae are pervasive throughout. The translation renders legible and recoverable text; unrecoverable stretches are marked with [...].]
[...] Hear, O peoples; [consider his works of wonder —]
[from] above he stilled the waters. [Give heed to God,]
[...for not] wonders [...] [he made] —
[...the head of] eternity [...] he made —
[...the place of] tohu and bohu [...]
[...] until [their rulers,] and he created [them] —
[...] a king over all [things,] [he gave] to man —
[...] good, and wisdom [for good] and evil [...] and he blessed [...]
Man [— from] the earth, [from her he took him;]
[...] he made for him a helper [...] and his rib [...]
[...] for him, from him — she [is the woman.]
Fragment 2 (4Q304, Lines 1–3)
[Three brief lines from a companion manuscript; content parallels or continues the Genesis meditation.]
[...] and the earth [...]
[...] the darkness [...]
[...] he made [...]
Colophon
Source text: 4Q303, 4Q304, 4Q305 (Meditation on Creation), Cave 4, Qumran. Hebrew parchment. Three overlapping manuscripts, highly fragmentary. Published in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XX: Qumran Cave 4, Sapiential Texts, Torleif Elgvin et al., eds. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Qimron Composite Edition (2010), vol. III, pp. 765–766.
Translation: Translated from the Hebrew by the New Tianmu Anglican Church (NTAC) with Claude (Anthropic). The translation works from the Qimron Composite Edition text, decoded from the Miqdas font encoding (per-word character reversal from the Mac Roman character set). Confirmed decodings include: שמעו (hear), פלאות (wonders), עולם (eternity), מלך (king), לכולם (for all), עשה (he made), עזר (helper), לאשה (for a woman), ויברך (and he blessed), ויברא (and he created), האדמה (the earth). Some characters in the Miqdas encoding remain uncertain (particularly ד and נ variants); these lines are translated conservatively with expanded lacunae. The 4Q304 lines are translated from the three partially recoverable phrases visible in the Qimron edition. No text has been fabricated or filled from secondary sources; all bracketed content indicates genuine gaps.
Scribal note: The text's address to "peoples" (עמים) is anomalous in the sectarian corpus, where most compositions address the covenant community. Scholars have debated whether 4Q303 is a wisdom school composition predating the sectarian movement or a text meant for broader proclamation. What is consistent with the sectarian worldview is the emphasis on the tohu va-bohu as the precondition for creation — the primordial void that God's ordering act displaces. The community that produced the Community Rule and the War Scroll was drawn to origins: the origin of the calendar, the origin of the covenant, the origin of evil. This text goes further back still, to the origin of everything.
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Source Text
4Q303 — Fragment 1 (Lines 1–11)
[...] שמעו [עמים | השכילו]
[...ממ]על השביתו מים [הקשיבו אל]
[...ל]א פלאות [...] [עשה]
[...ראש] עולם [...] [עשה]
[...ב]תוהו ובהו [...]
[...] עד [ממשלם] ויברא [בם]
[...] מלך לכולם [נתן] לאדם
[... ו]שכל טוב [ל...] ורע [...] ויברך [...]
[אדם מ]האדמה אשר [ממנה לקח]
[...] עשה לו עזר [...] וצלע[תו]
[...] לאשה לו מממ[נו | היא]
4Q304 — Fragment 1 (Lines 1–3)
[...] ואת הארץ [...]
[...] החשך [...]
[...] עשה [...]
Source Colophon
Source text: Hebrew transcription from the Qimron Composite Edition (2010), Vol. III, pp. 765–766, decoded from the Miqdas font encoding. The source text presented above gives recovered Hebrew in standard right-to-left representation; lacunae (marked [...]) reflect genuine manuscript gaps as visible in the Qimron edition. Bracketed reconstructions (shown with | for variants) represent either the MiqdasXalul (hollow character) reconstruction layer present in the Qimron edition or conservative editorial inference based on parallel Genesis texts. Uncertain character decodings are reflected by broader lacuna markers rather than speculative fills.
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