Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered - The Preterist Archive

Translation
Fragment 1 (1) . . . all the Righteous . . . (2) before Moses . . . (3) all the days of . . . ( 6) the years of . .
. will be lengthened . . .
Fragment 2 (1) [E]noch after we instructed him (2) . . . six jubilees of years (3) . . . [ea]rth among all
mankind and he witnessed against them all (4) . . . and also against the Watchers. And he wrote down
all the (5) . . . [the] heavens and all the paths of their hosts (i.e., the heavenly bodies), all [the months
(6) . . . [in which the Rig[hteous] have not erred . . .
20. Aramaic Tobit (4Q 196)
For Jews and Protestant Christians the book of Tobit is outside the canon of the Bible, being counted
among the Apocrypha. Catholics, however, along with the Greek and Russian Orthodox branches of
Christianity, regard the book as part of the Bible in the sense that it is 'Deuterocanonical'. Although
scholars for the most part believed that Tobit had originally been written in either Hebrew or Aramaic,
the Semitic original version was long lost. The book's primary witnesses were two rather different
Greek versions (one 'short' version and one 'long'). Thus the significance of the Qumran caches: they
include portions of four Aramaic manuscripts of the book, together with one Hebrew manuscript.
All of these manuscripts support the 'long' version of Tobit known from the Greek. It is now clear that
the short Greek version never had a Semitic counterpart and is nothing more than an abbreviation of
the long Greek text. Until very recently, however, Bible Translations into modern languages had
always relied upon the short text. In the wake of the Qumran discoveries, translators have begun to
work instead with the long text - still, unfortunately, having only the Greek witness; no more than a
few isolated phrases of the Qumran Semitic forms have previously been published.
The Semitic texts of Tobit will certainly require adjustments even of those Translations that have
worked with the superior long Greek text. For example, in the portion presented here (Tobit 1:19-2:2),
the latter half of the Aramaic text of 1:22 is preferable to the Greek. The New Revised Standard
Version translates the portion in question thus: 'Now Ahiqar was chief cupbearer, keeper of the signet