The scroll, designated 1QM, came from Cave 1 in nineteen columns with the foot of every column lost; related fragments from Cave 4 preserve a different and sometimes fuller recension. It opens with the Kittim, Assyria's Kittim and Egypt's, and the army of Belial: Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Amalek, and those in Israel who have broken the covenant. Against them stand the exiles of the desert, the sons of Levi, Judah and Benjamin.
The war lasts forty years and is scheduled. Sabbatical years are kept, so thirty-five years of actual fighting remain. The first six years mobilise all Israel against the Kittim; the remaining twenty-nine are spent in the War of Divisions against the surrounding nations, campaign by campaign, in an order the text lays out.
Within the war against the Kittim the structure is liturgical. Seven lots, or engagements, are joined. In three the Sons of Light prevail; in three the army of Belial drives back the ranks of God; in the seventh the great hand of God subdues Belial and all the angels of his dominion. The pattern is deliberate. It builds defeat into the design, so that reverses on the ground confirm the plan rather than refute it, and it reserves victory to divine intervention at the point where military logic would demand a decision.
The angelic and human orders are aligned. Michael is exalted among the gods and Israel among all flesh, and the battle is fought simultaneously by armies and by spirits. This is why the scroll can be so meticulous about equipment while insisting that no strength of arms achieves anything.