Psalms at Qumran
11QPsᵃ + the 4QPss family — The most extensively attested biblical book at Qumran
About These Scrolls
Psalms is the most extensively attested biblical book at Qumran — roughly forty manuscripts, more than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The headline witness is 11QPsᵃ (the Great Psalms Scroll), copied c. 30–50 CE in Cave 11. It preserves Psalms 91–150 in an order that differs substantially from the MT, and intermingles four apocryphal compositions: the Plea for Deliverance, the Apostrophe to Zion, the Hymn to the Creator, and the David's Compositions colophon. The scroll closes not with Ps 150 but with the Davidic autobiographical compositions Pss 151A (David as shepherd, the anointing) and Pss 151B (the Goliath battle).
Marquee text-critical findings: (1) Ps 22:16 — the Nahal Hever Psalms scroll preserves כָּארוּ (“they have pierced”) where MT reads כָּאֲרִי (“like a lion”), confirming the LXX/Vulgate reading. (2) Ps 145:13 — 11QPsᵃ preserves the nun-line of the alphabetic acrostic that the MT lost through haplography. (3) Ps 151 — the existence of a Hebrew Vorlage at Qumran confirmed that the LXX Psalm 151 is not a late Greek composition but translated from Hebrew. (4) The David's Compositions colophon claims David authored 4,050 songs, including 364 daily psalms (one for each day of the solar year) — the earliest comprehensive theory of Davidic psalmic authorship.
The 11QPsᵃ alternative ordering for Pss 91–150 (with apocrypha intermingled): 101, 102, 103, 109, 118, 104, 147, 105, 146, 148, 121–132, 119, 135, 136, Catena (combining 136+118), 145, 154 (apocryphal), Plea for Deliverance, 139, 137, 138, Sirach 51:13–30 (modified), Apostrophe to Zion, 93, 141, 133, 144, 155 (apocryphal), 142, 143, 149, 150, Hymn to the Creator, David's Last Words (2 Sam 23), David's Compositions colophon, 140, 134, Ps 151A, Ps 151B.
What you see below is a chapter-by-chapter survey of every psalm. Each entry notes which Qumran manuscripts attest the psalm, where significant variants exist (with full mt-vs-dss comparisons), and where 11QPsᵃ's alternative ordering or composition-mixing is documented. Psalm 151 (with its two Hebrew components 151A and 151B) appears at the end of the chapter list as a non-MT entry.