Greek Minor Prophets Scroll

Bought First, Excavated Afterwards

This scroll reached scholarship the wrong way round. Fragments of it were sold to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in the early 1950s by clandestine diggers who said they came from Wadi Seiyal, and it was only in 1961, when Y. Aharoni's expedition excavated a cave in the cliffs of Nahal Hever known as the Cave of Horror, that matching fragments came out of the ground and settled where the scroll had actually been. That is why its siglum begins with the number of the cave. The two halves were published together in 1990, edited by E. Tov with R. A. Kraft and a palaeographic contribution from P. J. Parsons, as volume 8 of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert.

What survives is about twenty-six columns of a scroll reconstructed at something near fifty-five, carrying parts of six books: Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Zechariah. Two scribes wrote it. The Israel Antiquities Authority's digital library holds it as manuscript 8Hev1 with 111 photographs, and lists it plainly as parchment, Greek script, Roman period. In March 2021 the Antiquities Authority announced that a survey of the same cave, reached by rappelling some eighty metres down a cliff face, had recovered further fragments of this very scroll — text from Zechariah 8:16-17 and Nahum 1:5-6 — sixty years after the first excavation.

The Septuagint, Under Revision

The reason this scroll matters is what D. Barthélemy saw in it. He announced it in 1953 and published it fully in 1963 under a title that says the thesis: Les Devanciers d'Aquila, the forerunners of Aquila of Sinope. This is not a fresh translation of the Twelve into Greek, and it is not simply a copy of the Septuagint. It is the Septuagint revised — corrected, reading by reading, towards a Hebrew text of the kind that would later become the Masoretic standard. The revision has a name taken from one of its tics, the kaige recension, and it turned out to stand at the head of a line running on through the second-century Jewish translators Aquila of Sinope, Theodotion and Symmachus.

That reframes a question this app's article on the Septuagint also raises. The differences between the Greek Old Testament and the Hebrew one were often put down to loose translators, and this app's article on the Septuagint sets out how the Judean Desert finds changed that. This scroll shows Jewish scholars in Judea, before the New Testament existed, treating the Greek as something to be brought into line with the Hebrew — which means the differences were already visible to them, and mattered to them. P. J. Gentry states the state of play carefully: the process of making "systematic, thoroughgoing revisions (called recensions) continued from possibly 200 bc through ad 200," and "the precise line of demarcation between original Greek translations and later revisers in this corpus of texts has, in fact, not yet been clearly established."

The Divine Name, and What It Does Not Settle

The scroll's most-discussed feature is a piece of typography. Where the Hebrew has the divine name, this Greek text does not write a Greek word at all: it writes the four Hebrew letters, in the old palaeo-Hebrew script, inside the running Greek — twenty-eight times, twenty-four in one scribe's hand and four in the other's. A reader can see it on the Antiquities Authority's own plates. A. R. Meyer, who has catalogued the evidence, notes that the scribes left no gaps for it and did not go back to fill it in: "both hands appear to write the Tetragrammaton left-to-right in scriptio continua at the same time the Greek text was copied."

The claim usually built on that in popular writing is that it shows the original Greek Old Testament wrote the divine name in Hebrew rather than translating it as kyrios, "Lord" — and that is more than the evidence carries. The majority position runs the other way: E. Tov's judgement is that "all the texts transcribing the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters reflect early revisions, in which the employment of Hebrew characters was considered a sign of authenticity, even though this practice only entered the transmission of Greek Scriptures at a second stage." On that reading, the Hebrew letters are part of the correcting, not part of the original. But the argument is not closed, and Meyer names the manuscript that keeps it open: P. Oxy. 5101, a Psalms papyrus A. Pietersma regards as a genuine Old Greek witness whose "sole recensional trait" is the palaeo-Hebrew divine name — which, if right, breaks the link between revision and Hebrew letters that the majority case depends on. A third possibility is that the earliest Greek wrote the name as iaō, which is what the Cave 4 Greek Leviticus fragments actually have. Meyer's own conclusion is the honest one: "the correlation itself is not decisive for understanding the role of the divine name in the textual history of the Septuagint."

Scripture references

• Habakkuk 3:9 — Preserved on this scroll — one of the verses that shows chapter 3 belonged to the book before the New Testament era
• Zechariah 8:16-17 — Recovered from the same cave in 2021, sixty years after the first excavation
• Nahum 1:5-6 — The other passage in the 2021 fragments
• Micah 5:4-5 — One of the passages where the scroll writes the divine name in Hebrew letters inside the Greek — twice in verse 4. Hebrew Bibles number these verses 5:3-4, which is how the scholarly literature cites them

Sources

• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library: 8Hev1, Minor Prophets — Israel Antiquities Authority · The authority's own record: "Minor Prophets", "8Hev1 - 8Hev XII", site "Cave of Horror", "Biblical Compositions", "Translation of Scripture", language and script Greek, period Roman, material parchment, 111 images, and the publication given as "Tov, Emanuel 1990. DJD 8: 1-169." Read in full. Note that the record itself assigns no date. Note also that the verse identifications visible on individual plate pages are comments left by site visitors, not the authority's own metadata, and are not used hereSupports: The material, script, findspot, image count, and the official publication
• ScholarshipE. Tov, with R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr) — Emanuel Tov, Robert A. Kraft and Peter J. Parsons · Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). The official edition, and the source of the column counts, the two hands and the palaeographic date as those are reported. It was NOT opened here: no readable copy could be reached, and the Internet Archive's scan is lending-restricted. Parsons's own palaeographic argument is therefore named and not restated, and the date given in this article's facts block is the one reported from this edition rather than one read in itSupports: The column counts, the two scribal hands, and the conventional date
• ScholarshipA. R. Meyer, The Divine Name in Early Judaism: Use and Non-Use in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek — Anthony R. Meyer, McMaster University · Doctoral thesis, McMaster University, 2017, supervised by D. A. Machiela; later published as Naming God in Early Judaism (Schöningh, 2022). Read in full. Source for the twenty-eight occurrences of the Tetragrammaton and their division between the two hands, for the scribes writing it without leaving gaps, for the quotation from Tov in section three (which Meyer quotes from Tov's own essay and which is therefore reported at one remove), for A. Pietersma on P. Oxy. 5101, and for Meyer's own conclusionSupports: The palaeo-Hebrew divine name, and all three positions on what it does and does not show
• ScholarshipP. J. Gentry, "The Text of the Old Testament" — Peter J. Gentry, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary · Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 52:1 (March 2009), 19-45. Freely readable and read in full. Source for the two sentences quoted in section two on the recensions and on where the line between translation and revision has not been drawnSupports: The place of the kaige recension in the history of the Greek Old Testament
• ScholarshipD. Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d'Aquila — Dominique Barthélemy · Vetus Testamentum Supplements 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963), preceded by "Redécouverte d'un chaînon manquant de l'histoire de la Septante", Revue Biblique 60 (1953), 18-29. The book that identified the kaige recension. NO accessible copy could be reached and it was NOT opened; its thesis is stated here at the level its own title states it, and the wider description is taken from Gentry and Meyer rather than from BarthélemySupports: That this scroll is a revision of the Septuagint towards the Hebrew, and the name of the recension
• Holding institutionIsrael Antiquities Authority, "A challenging Israel Antiquities Authority operation has uncovered thrilling finds in the Judean Desert" — Israel Antiquities Authority, reproduced by the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority · The press release of 16 March 2021, read in full in this reproduction because antiquities.org.il refuses automated requests. It reports that the new fragments "was written, uniquely by two different scribes", that "despite most of the text being in Greek, the name of God appears in ancient Hebrew script", and describes the descent into the cave. The verse identifications — Zechariah 8:16-17 and Nahum 1:5-6 — are from the Times of Israel's report of the same announcementSupports: The 2021 recovery of further fragments and which passages they carry
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever

Further reading

• Israel Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Digital Library: 8Hev1 Minor Prophets
• P. J. Gentry, "The Text of the Old Testament" (JETS 52/1)
• Wikipedia: Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever

Reflect

Someone sat in Judea two thousand years ago and corrected a Bible translation line by line against the Hebrew. What would you check that carefully?