The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins

The identification and assembling of the fragments that make up the Tobit texts 4Q196–200 were the work of Jόsef Tadeusz Milik, who worked on them from approximately 1953 to 1960. What I present here is mostly dependent on his pioneering work. Today these fragments are found in their most definitive form on ten photographs, PAM 43.175–84. Specific references will be given below to these photographs, along with the numbers of older ones, which sometimes help in deciphering the fragments. The photographs marked with an asterisk were used for plates I–X of volume 19 of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series.

Five fragmentary texts of Tobit have been recovered from Qumran. Of these, four (4QTob ^a-d ar) are in Aramaic and one (4QTob^e) is in Hebrew. The texts are composed of sixty-nine fragments or groups of fragments (a group being defined as joined fragments that belong together or related fragments that cannot be physically joined). 4QpapTob^a ar has nineteen identified fragments or groups of fragments and thirty tiny unidentified fragments. Tob^b ar has five fragments or groups of fragments identified and two that are unidenti

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