The Barki Nafshi Texts (4Q434-439)

DAVID ROLPH SEELY

Brigham Young University

Although the scrolls from Qumran were discovered nearly fifty years ago, some very important texts still remain to be "rediscovered" in the Qumran corpus. Among the relatively unknown texts from Cave 4 are a series of six scrolls referred to as the Barki Nafshi texts, numbered 4Q434 through 4Q439, which are named after the opening line of 4Q434, which reads 'J'i~ n~ 1tDElJ '::li:J "Bless, 0 my soul, the Lord." These texts were originally assigned to John Strugnell, who then reassigned them to Moshe Weinfeld for official publication in the DJD series. Since then, I have been invited to work with Professor Weinfeld on these texts. We are at various stages in our work for each of the texts, and much of the following discussion is of a preliminary nature. Strugnell has done some significant work on the texts and has sent us some of his notes. At several points I am indebted to his work as indicated in the text and footnotes. The Barki Nafshi texts consist of six sets of fragments, apparently sorted according to the scribal hand, and in some cases according to the similarities of the leather upon which they are written. Several of these texts have been published recently: a set of fragments, referred to as 4Q434a, has been published by Professor Weinfeld, who identified the fragments as an early The Barki Nafshi Texts 195 form of the Grace after Meals for Mourners. I Three of the texts, 4Q434, 434a, and 436, have been published by Eisenman and Wise;2 more recently translations of all three of these texts have been published by Garcia Martinez;3 and Vermes, in the fourth edition of his collection of Dead Sea Scroll texts, has included a translation of 4Q434.4 Furthermore, in the last several years allusions to these texts have been made in various books and articles dealing with the Qumran texts. Many of the recent statements that have appeared in print about these texts need to be clarified. For example, some texts have been categorized as blessings or prayers; others have been described as hymns of praise or thanksgiving; and one text pub• lished by Weinfeld, 4Q434a, has been labeled a liturgical text. Eisenman and Wise call these texts "Hymns of the Poor" and argue that the words of the poor found in them should be under• stood as terms of self-designation by the Qumran community, which they believe was the forerunner of the early Christian sect of the Ebionites.5 Scholars have suggested that these texts repre• sent a Barki Nafshi genre of texts. Some scholars have seen them as various copies of the same hymn, and others have described them as "copies of a collection of hymns.,,6 Likewise, 4Q439, which appears to be different from the other texts, is

Moshe Weinfeld, "Grace after Meals in Qumran," IBL III (1992): 427-40. 2 Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncov• ered (London: Penguin, 1992),238-41. Eisenman and Wise identify 4Q436 as "Fragment 1," 4Q434 as "Fragment 2," and 4Q434a as "Fragment 3." 3 Florentino Garda Martinez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 1994),436-37,439. 4 Geza Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 4th ed. (London: Penguin, 1994),280-81. 5 Eisenman and Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, 233-41. 6 Eileen M. Schuller, "Prayer, Hymnic, and Liturgical Texts," in The Community of the Renewed Covenant: The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Eugene Ulrich and James VanderKam (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 158.