Isaiah, Chapter 39 (Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsa-a)

Introduction

Isaiah 39 from the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a), the complete copy of Isaiah found in Cave 1 at Qumran in 1947 and now in the Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Copied around 125 BCE, it is roughly a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete Masoretic manuscript. This chapter stands in col. XXXII (32) of the scroll's 54 columns.

1. Scan: each section is shown with the actual column of the scroll that carries it, cropped from the Israel Museum / Google Art Project photograph of the whole scroll published on Wikimedia Commons (public domain). The column for every verse comes from the transcription itself, which records the column and line of each word.
2. Hebrew: the scroll's own text, verbatim from the ETCBC dss Text-Fabric dataset (Jacobs, Naaijer and Roorda, from Martin G. Abegg Jr.'s transcription; CC BY-NC 4.0). This is not the Masoretic text: 1QIsa^a uses a fuller spelling (for example לוא for לא, כיא for כי) and differs from the Masoretic text in a number of readings. No vowel points exist in the scroll and none are added. Marks: ⟨x⟩ letters the scribe added above the line, [x] modern reconstruction of text lost to damage, {{x}} letters cancelled by an ancient scribe, ⟪x⟫ an ancient correction, a dot under a letter (x̣) an uncertain reading, ···· four dots written in place of the divine name (Tetrapuncta).
3. English: the King James Version (1611, public domain), verbatim from bible-api.com. The KJV translates the Masoretic text, so where the scroll reads differently the English will not match the Hebrew shown; the scroll's reading can be checked on the column image.