4Q Barkhi Nafshi (Hebrew "Bless Oh My Soul", not to be confused with
Psalm 104
Psalm 104 is the 104th psalm of the Book of Psalms, beginning in English in the King James Version: "Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great". In Latin, it is known as "Benedic anima mea Domino".
In the slightly different ...
) is a
Second Temple period Jewish work found at
Qumran
Qumran ( he, קומראן; ar, خربة قمران ') is an archaeological site in the West Bank managed by Israel's Qumran National Park. It is located on a dry marl plateau about from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, near the Israeli ...
. It can be generally described a collection of Hebrew language hymns giving thanksgiving for deliverance and other benefits received from God. Seely identifies the text as a late Hasmonean or early Herodian sectarian work. The hymns contain abstraction of the concept of deliverance from the evil thought, or
yetzer ha ra, as in 4Q438 4a ii.6 where Tigechelaar has demonstrated an intertextual relationship between the Satan of Zechariah 3 and the "clothing" of the speaker of Barkhi Nafshi.
[Miryam Brand ''Evil Within and Without: The Source of Sin and Its Nature as Portrayed in Second Temple Literature'' Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (15 May 2013) p. 47]
Components
* 4Q434 Barkhi Nafshi a SL71 156 SL93/93a
Weinfeld, Seely, DJD XXIX (1999), plates XVII–XIX
* 4Q435 Barkhi Nafshi b SL73 327 SL93a Weinfeld, Seely, DJD XXIX (1999), pl. XX
* 4Q436 Barkhi Nafshi c SL72 325 SL73a Weinfeld, Seely, DJD XXIX (1999), pl. XXI
* 4Q437 Barkhi Nafshi d SL74 325 516 SL73a Weinfeld, Seely, DJD XXIX (1999), pls. XXII–XXIII
* 4Q438 Barkhi Nafshi e SL87 259 SL87 Weinfeld, Seely, DJD XXIX (1999), pls. XXIII–XXIV
References
Dead Sea Scrolls
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