Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever
The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever is a Greek manuscript of a revision of the Septuagint dated to the 1st century CE. The manuscript is kept in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. It was first published by Dominique Barthélemy in 1963. The Rahlfs-Siglum is 943.
Discovery and history
The Dead Sea Scrolls were found by Bedouins between 1952 and 1954. The Bedouins sold their finds to researchers in East Jerusalem, which belonged to Jordan at the time, while the Wadi Seiyal was part of the territory of Israel. Among the fragments were also parts of a scroll of the Twelve Prophets book. Amongst other things, in response to rumors, that parts of the sold scrolls came from Israel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem sent two expeditions in 1960 and 1961 for exploration thorough Wadi to the west of the Dead Sea. In the expedition B of the company in spring 1961 under the direction of Yohanan Aharoni, who examined mainly the caves on the southern edge of Nahal Hever in Cave no. 8 it finds: Among other things, fragments of the Greek scroll. Most of which only a few centimeters between large fragments could be still associate with the twelve minor prophets. It also became apparent relatively quickly that the fragments were parts of the same scroll that had been purchased ten years earlier. The locality of this role - as well as most of the other scrolls of the Seiyâl Collection - was therefore contrary to the specification of the Bedouin of the Nachal Chever determined before.Due to the excavations of the Bedouins, the archaeological context could no longer be determined. However, a fire layer has been found. which suggests that the last inhabitants of the cave have all their possessions, especially documents, that could provide information about other insurgents that wanted to destroy them so as not to let them fall into the hands of the Romans. These besieged the inmates as a military camp located above the cave shows. The fact that the scroll survived this fire indicates that it had been buried before. This practice is mainly known from the later Jewish tradition, but was also observed in this twelve-prophet scroll of Wadi Murabba'at.
Parts of the manuscript were found by an expedition of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the early 1960s in cave No. 8 in Nahal Hever named Cave of Horror. Other fragments had been purchased a decade earlier from Bedouins. For those the siglum Se2grXII was used when they were acquired by the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Emanuel Tov wrote that "these small fragments were published by B. Lifshitz, "The Greek Documents from th Cave of Horror," IEJ 12 201-7 as well as in a Hebrew Version."
In 1953, scarcely a year after the bedouin had brought these materials to the École biblique et archéologique française in Jordanian Jerusalem, Jean-Dominique Barthélemy published his preliminary study in French of the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from the then "unknown provenance" somewhere south of Wadi Murabba'at.
George Howard states:
Description
Version
The fragmentary state of preservation of the text also makes statements about the textual character difficult. However, the editors agree that this is an early revision of the Septuagint in alignment with the Hebrew text. Dominique Barthélemy established that text found "is neither a new translation nor an independent one, but raher a recension of the Septuagint text". According Tuukka Kauhanen, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Theology at University of Helsinki, this manuscript is an early Hebraizing revision, Eugene C. Ulrich wrote "attests the recension commonly referred to as Proto-Theodotion or καιγε" recension, which is reaffirmed by Pavlos Vasileiadis, a Doctor of Theology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. James A.E. Mulroney quoting Emanuel Tov, Robert A. Kraft and Peter J. Parsons claim that "although 8HevXIIgr was a revision of OG towards the proto-MT, it retained significant continuity with the OG text… was a revision, not a new translation". David L. Washburn wrote that is a direct translation from an MT-type manuscript into Greek, i.e. not part of the Septuagint tradition.Dimensions and content
The roll is one of the partially preserved, basically better in the lower part. Only column 8 contains parts of all four edges, from most other columns usually only the lower one as well, parts of the right or left edge. Reconstruction attempts show that the average number of lines per column is about 42. In contrast, in the back part, which can be assigned to another hand, the letters are written larger, and therefore the columns contain only 33 lines. The columns therefore had a height of about 27 cm. The column width, however, varies between 7.5 and 9 cm or 29 and 43 letters, in the back even only 22-24 letters. This is apparently related to the width of the individual leather sheets sewn together into a roll. While the sheets themselves were different in width, the columns appear to have been drawn relatively evenly on a sheet. The height of the roll can finally be determined with about 35 cm. Calculations on the number of columns depend very much on what content the role had. Assuming an originally complete twelve-prophecy book, the role should have included between 80 and 94 columns, which would correspond to about 9.6 – 10 m. The role would be longer than any surviving scrolls from Qumran. However, only parts of the books Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Zechariah are identified.Text and scribe
As differences in letter form and size show, the manuscript was written by two different scribes. On the other hand, the assumption that instead the fragments should be divided into two different roles is less likely. The cause of the various clerk hands, however, is unclear. Either the role was first started by a writer and later ended by a second, or else the leather sheets with the second manuscript were inserted for repair. Several lines have been left between the individual books, but possible book titles are not attested. The continuous text is divided into larger and smaller sections, and it is even possible to observe a division into verses. The division into units of meaning agrees largely with the division of the Masoretic text in Setumot and Petuchot. To mark such sections, either draw a horizontal line between the lines - an paragraph - or the new line starts slightly to the left and with a slightly larger initial letter. Between individual words of a verse, however, at first hand there is usually no gap left.Tetragrammaton
Clearly Jewish manuscripts of Greek translations of the Old Testament differ from clearly Christian manuscripts in not using Kύριος or the nomina sacra and to represent the Tetragrammaton. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1007 is in fact difficult to identify as either Christian or Jewish, as on the barely legible recto side it contains the nomen sacrum and the Tetragrammaton represented as a double yodh יי. According to Edmon Gallagher, a faculty member of Heritage Christian University, "extant Greek manuscripts from Qumran and elsewhere that are unambiguously Jewish also include several ways of representing the Divine Name, none of which was with κύριος, the term used everywhere in our Christian manuscripts". He concludes that there is no certainty about whether it was a Jew or a Christian who transcribed the Cairo Genizah manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible by Aquila, in which the Tetragrammaton is generally given in paleo-Hebrew letters but in one instance, where there was insufficient space at the end of a line, by, the nomen sacrum rendering of the genitive case of Κύριος. Jewish manuscripts, such as those found in Qumran, did not render it into Greek, but instead reproduced it within the Greek text in several different ways. Some gave it in either Hebrew, Aramaic or paleo-Hebrew letters. Others transliterated it in Greek characters as ΠΙΠΙ or ΙΑΩ.In this manuscript the tetragrammaton in Old Hebrew script appears in Jon 3:3; Jon 4:2; Mic 1:1, 3; Mic 4:4, 5, 7; Mic 5:4, 4; Hab 2:14, 16, 20; Hab 3:9; Zep 1:3, 14; Zep 2:10; Zec 1:3, 3, 4; Zec 3:5, 6, 7; Zec 8:20; 9:1, 1, 4. The scribe himself seems to have inserted the paleo-Hebrew characters directly, probably from left to right, contrary to the normal direction for Hebrew, when writing the Greek text.
It has the tetragrammaton everywhere in the phrase ἄγγελος יהוה instead of ἄγγελος Κυρίου in Zech 3:1-2, 5 and 6. The oldest example of ἄγγελος Κυρίου is in P. Oxy. 1166 from 3rd century, more than two centuries after LXXVTS10a.