Capstone Bible
  1. Library
  2. Topics
  3. Genesis Apocryphon

An Aramaic Retelling of Genesis, and the Tail End of a Much Longer Scroll

Genesis Apocryphon

Also called Genesis Apocryphon Scroll

The most extensive Aramaic manuscript from the Dead Sea caves: a first-person retelling of Genesis from Lamech to Abram — and, on the evidence of its own sheet numbering, all that survives of a roll perhaps four times longer.

Siglum
1QapGen (1Q20)
Type
Parchment scroll, 31 cm high and 2.38 m long as it survives, in twenty-two or twenty-three partly preserved columns
Language
Aramaic
Contents
A first-person retelling of Genesis 5:28-15:4, from the birth of Noah to the covenant with Abram. Columns 19-22, which lay at the centre of the rolled scroll, are the best preserved; the rest range from fragmentary to barely legible. Not a copy of Genesis and not a biblical manuscript
Written
First century BC to first century AD, on the Israel Museum's record. No radiocarbon figure is printed here — see the citations Traditional dating
Origin
Judea. The composition is usually dated to the second century BC; this copy is later, and is not the autograph
Found at
Qumran, Cave 1
Found in
1947 — some accounts say late 1946
Found by
Bedouin of the Ta'amireh tribe; the scroll passed through the Bethlehem antiquities trade to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, who advertised it for sale, and was bought on behalf of the State of Israel in 1954. No individual finder is named by the holding institution
Now held at
The Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Shelfmark
95.57/20,29-39

The Scroll That Would Not Open

This was one of the four Cave 1 scrolls bought by the Syriac Orthodox archbishop in Jerusalem, and for years it was the one nobody could read: so brittle and so stuck together that it could not be unrolled at all. When it was finally opened, D. A. Machiela describes what was there — "the most extensive Aramaic text found among the DSS, measuring 31 cm high by 2.38 m long, and containing twenty-three partially-preserved columns of text; the best preserved are columns 19-22, which were rolled at the center of the scroll." Counts of twenty-two and twenty-three are both in print and both are right: the difference is whether a badly damaged column at the head is numbered 0 or left out. The Israel Museum holds it as accession 95.57/20,29-39.

The first edition, by N. Avigad and Y. Yadin in 1956, gave the world five columns, and its own subtitle says which: columns II and XIX-XXII. That was the readable part. Almost forty years later M. Morgenstern, E. Qimron and D. Sivan published the rest — columns 0, I, III-VIII and X-XVII, most of them very fragmentary — working from infrared photographs and from new digital images, because in the meantime the leather itself had darkened past reading. The imaging was not incidental. A team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tested infrared cameras on a fragment of this very scroll in 1993, and reported that at wavelengths beyond what film or ordinary digital sensors could see, "we can make out another word of text which is invisible" otherwise. Anyone still describing this manuscript from the 1956 edition is describing a fifth of it, and that is the commonest mistake made about it.

Genesis, Told by the People in It

What survives reworks Genesis 5:28 to 15:4, and the striking thing about it is the voice. Much of it is first person: Lamech speaks, then Noah, then Abram, telling their own stories. The book of Genesis reports that Abram, going down into Egypt, asked Sarai to say she was his sister; this scroll has Abram receive a dream beforehand that sanctions what he does, and then has him describe Sarai's beauty at length. It runs so close to the biblical text in places that it is nearly translation — Machiela points to column 20, lines 26-27, against Genesis 12:18-19 — and elsewhere it expands freely: the division of the earth among Noah's descendants runs for two columns where Genesis has a list, and Abram walks the length and breadth of the land, which Genesis 13 tells him to do and does not describe.

It is not a sectarian composition. Machiela states the consensus and the caution together: "There is a broad scholarly consensus that, along with the other Aramaic DSS, the Apocryphon was not written by the group responsible for the distinctive Hebrew sectarian literary works. Nevertheless, it was presumably kept and studied by that group." Nor is it a Bible. It stands in the same territory as Jubilees and 1 Enoch — Jewish writing of the last centuries BC that retells Scripture rather than transmitting it — and its relation to Jubilees is itself argued over — Machiela's own summary of the field names E. Eshel and himself as putting this one earlier and J. Kugel "and others" as arguing the opposite. Reading it beside Genesis shows something a commentary cannot: what these stories sounded like to people who had them by heart and could not leave them alone.

Only the End of It

The most arresting thing about this manuscript is not in it. Ancient scrolls were made of sheets sewn end to end, and scribes sometimes lettered the sheets in alphabetical order. M. Morgenstern noticed the letters on this one and published what follows from them in 1996: the last surviving sheet is marked with pe, the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. "With five to seven columns on a sheet," he wrote, "this means that the scroll is missing anything from 70 to 105 columns. The more conservative estimate still provides us with the startling fact that the remains of the Apocryphon as we have it today are only the tail-end of an enormously long scroll." On the width of the sheets that do survive, he reckoned the lost beginning at some nine metres.

It is worth being exact about what that does and does not establish. It is an argument from sheet lettering, published in a short note, and Morgenstern draws the honest conclusion himself: "It is a matter of speculation what these missing columns might have contained... We shall sadly never know." What he does think it settles is a question that had been live — whether this is really a Genesis apocryphon or a lost Book of Noah wearing another name — since the Noah material, which dominates what survives, cannot have carried a roll of that length. Set beside the reading problem, the two facts make the same point in different directions. Even the twenty-two or twenty-three columns we have are not fully legible: "Countless are the letters and parts of letters visible on the twenty-two surviving columns whose identification and interpretation are still uncertain." This is a manuscript that has to be argued about letter by letter, and any confident summary of it — including a confident summary of how much of it is gone — is running ahead of the evidence.

Scripture references

Sources

Further reading

Reflect

Most of this scroll is gone — seventy columns at the very least, on its own scribe's sheet-lettering — and nobody will ever know what was on them. What do you do with the parts of a story you cannot recover?

More topics

Capstone Bible is a free interactive study app — a map of every place in this library, a zoomable timeline of biblical and church history, the Bible text with every name in it linked to its article, reading plans and personal notes.

Open Capstone Bible