Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

has come, and the earth will be full of Knowledge and praise of God. F[or] (5) the era of peace has
come, and the laws of Truth and the testimony of Rightousness, to teach [all mankind] (6) the Ways of
God and the mightiness of His works; [they shall be instructed until all Eternity. All cr[eation] (7) will
bless Him, and every man will bow down before Him in worship, and their he[arts will be] as one. For
He [prepared] (8) their actions before ever they were created, and [measured out] the service of
Righteousness as their portion (9) in their generations. For the rule of Goodness (Righteousness) has
come, and He has raised up the Throne of the [Messiah.] (10) And Wisdom will increase greatly.
Insight and understanding will be confirmed by the works of [His] Holiness . . .
32. Admonitions To The Sons Of Dawn (4Q298) (Plate 10)
On the surface, there is nothing astonishing about this text and no reason why it should be written in
an unknown script, called earlier by some scholars 'cryptic'. We have been able to decipher it and
provide the following chart, which equates the letters used in the text with their corresponding
Hebrew forms:
The letters used are not those of 4Q186, another work using a kind of cryptic script. 4Q186, which has
been known for some time, mixes a few words written in the Greek and Paleo-Hebrew alphabets with
those in ordinary square Hebrew letters. Furthermore it is inscribed in mirror writing. By contrast, the
Admonitions to the Sons of Dawn does not mix scripts, moves from right to left, and relies on 23
more or less arbitrary symbols.
It also uses a character or symbol, perhaps a syntactic marker or null character, which has no
equivalent in the Hebrew alphabet. Null symbols serve no other function than to complicate a script's
decipherment. In some cases, a script of this kind may not even be 'cryptic' at all, but simply have not
come down to us and therefore be 'unknown'. Given the nature of the letters of this script, however,
and the correspondences we have worked out, this is unlikely.
Like 'Wisdom' texts generally, the text before us follows a relatively calmer style similar to that of the
Sons of Righteousness (Proverbs) and the Demons of Death (Beatitudes) that follow, and large
portions of the Children of Salvation (Yesha') and the Mystery of Existence at the end of Chapter 7. In
Line 1.2, it is addressed to 'the pursuers after Righteousness . . . and the seekers of Faith'. These are
important allusions when the motifs we have been signaling in this work are considered. The first, in