The Thanksgiving Hymns scroll (designated 1QHa) was discovered in 1947 in Cave 1 at Khirbet Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, as part of the initial cache of seven major scrolls recovered by Bedouin shepherds and subsequently acquired by scholars. Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University, who obtained several scrolls in late 1947, was among the first to identify and begin publishing the hymnic texts. The reconstructed manuscript is held by the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed at the Shrine of the Book within the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The scroll is composed of thin leather sheets sewn into a single roll, originally extending to roughly 28 columns of Hebrew text. Significant deterioration and lacunae complicate reconstruction, but approximately 40 individual hymns have been identified. Each opens with a characteristic first-person formula, and the compositions draw extensively on the diction of the canonical Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Job. Scholars distinguish two broad compositional groupings within the collection: hymns associated by some researchers with a community Teacher of Righteousness figure, and more generalized communal hymns. Both groups employ imagery of divine rescue from the pit, the language of a new heart drawn from Ezekiel 36, and Isaianic servant-figure motifs. For biblical scholarship, the Hodayot demonstrate how Second Temple communities engaged scriptural texts not merely as reference material but as a generative literary matrix for original composition. The scroll confirms that psalmic and prophetic language was actively reworked in liturgical contexts by the late Second Temple period, providing comparative evidence for understanding the formation and use of the Hebrew Psalter. Dating of the manuscript by paleographic analysis to approximately the late first century BC anchors its relevance for contextualizing New Testament-era Jewish worship practice and the reception history of prophetic texts. **Sources:** Eileen Schuller and Carol Newsom, *The Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms): A Study Edition of 1QHa* (Society of Biblical Literature, 2012); Florentino García Martínez and Eibert Tigchelaar, *The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition*, vol. 1 (Brill/Eerdmans, 1997); Psalms 22:1; Isaiah 53:1-12; Ezekiel 36:26.
The Hodayot preserve the most extensive non-biblical Hebrew hymnody recovered from the Second Temple period, revealing how Qumran authors internalized and redeployed canonical psalm and prophetic language within a structured sectarian liturgical framework.