"...the angel of the Presence..."
— 3Q7, apparatus-confirmed Jubilees tradition

3Q7 — Cave 3 Hebrew Fragment — Dead Sea Scrolls

3Q7 is designated צוואה (Testament) in the DJD series. Published in DJD III (Baillet, Milik, de Vaux, 1962), p. 99. One of five very small fragments in early Herodian script — only two words and a few letters survive with confidence. The apparatus identifies the surviving letters as matching vocabulary from the Testament of Judah 25:1–2.

Testament of Judah 25 describes the resurrection of the patriarchs and the gathering of the twelve tribes for the age to come: Levi is first, Judah second, Joseph third, Benjamin fourth, Simeon fifth, Issachar sixth, and so on. The fragment's apparent ordinal ("sixth") fits this numbered list, placing Issachar at his appointed position in the eschatological assembly.

The fragment's second clear phrase — "the angel of the Presence" (מלאך הפנים) — is a title specific to the Jubilees tradition. In Jubilees, the angel of the Presence is the highest of the angels, who dictates the heavenly tablets to Moses on Sinai (Jub 1:27–29; 2:1) and oversees the ordering of Israel's sacred calendar. His appearance here, in a testament text concerned with resurrection and tribal order, suggests an apocalyptic expansion: the promise of the age to come, laid out in TJud 25's tribal list, may have been revealed or confirmed by the same angel who dictated the heavenly order of Jubilees to Moses. At Qumran, both Jubilees and the testaments were treasured texts; their intersection in 3Q7, however fragmentary, belongs to the same apocalyptic vision of a cosmos ordered from above.

Fragment 5

[...] sh[...][...] the sixth [...][...] the angel of the Presence [...][...] [...]

Colophon

Translated from the Hebrew (3Q7) 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), p. 99, with reference to DJD III (Baillet, Milik, de Vaux; Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 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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