Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever

In the 1st century CE, the 8HevXII gr with several documents was taken by Jewish fugitives (Bar Kokhba's troops, women and children) who were taking refuge in the Caves of Nahal Hever.

[1] After accepting their death, unable to leave because of the presence of Roman camps outside the caves, who besieged the inmates as a military camp located above the cave shows, the refugees decided to make a large bonfire and burn all their belongings, but buried the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and other important documents between the rocks of the end chamber.

[2] This practice is mainly known from the later Jewish tradition (Geniza), but was also observed in this twelve-prophet scroll apparently from Wadi Murabba'at.

The Bedouins sold their finds to researchers in East Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian control at the time, while Wadi Seiyal was in Israel.

[4] In 1953, scarcely a year after the Bedouin had brought these materials to the École biblique et archéologique française in Jordanian Jerusalem, Dominique Barthélemy published a "brief analysis of the fragments"[5] in French of the Greek Minor Prophets scroll from the then "unknown provenance" somewhere south of Wadi Murabba'at.

[6] 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 through the Wadi to the west of the Dead Sea.

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 Hever determined previously.

[8] In 1961[9] and 1962,[10][11] Lifshitz published the fragments with photographs in Yediot and in Israel Exploration Journal which Emanuel Tov called "the first edition, still substandard".

[8] Tov wrote that "these small fragments were published by B. Lifshitz, "The Greek Documents from th Cave of Horror," IEJ 12 (1962) 201-7 as well as in a Hebrew Version.

"[12] Lifshitz thinks that there are two apart manuscripts of the Greek Minor Prophets Scroll because repeated biblical verses appear in his textual identifications.

[11] According to Tuukka Kauhanen, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Theology at University of Helsinki, this manuscript is an early Hebraizing revision (i.e. in B-text of books such as Joshua, Judges, and Samuel-Kings),[16] Eugene C. Ulrich wrote "attests the recension commonly referred to as Proto-Theodotion or καιγε" recension,[17] which is reaffirmed by Pavlos D. Vasileiadis, a Doctor of Theology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

[19] David L. Washburn wrote that is a direct translation from an MT-type manuscript into Greek, i.e. not part of the Septuagint tradition.

[21] Clearly Jewish manuscripts of Greek translations of the Old Testament (Septuagint, Proto-Masoretic, kaige, the translations of Aquila of Sinope, Symmachus the Ebionite, Theodotion and the Hexapla) differ from clearly Christian manuscripts in not using Kύριος or the nomina sacra Θς and κς (with a horizontal line above the contracted words) 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 (in Gen 2:18) it contains the nomen sacrum ΘΣ (characteristic of Christian manuscripts) and the Tetragrammaton represented as a double yodh יי (characteristic of Jewish manuscripts).

[23] 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 (not the LXX), 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 κυ, the nomen sacrum rendering of the genitive case of Κύριος.

George Howard states, in Journal of Biblical Literature (1977): In 1952 fragments of a scroll of the Twelve Prophets in Greek were found in a cave in Nahal Hever in the Judean Desert.

Ten years later he published most of the fragments with a full analysis of the text and the place that it holds in the transmission history of the LXX.

Furthermore, if Lifshitz's restorations are correct, the text represented by his fragments differs in character from Barthelemy's in that the word θεος appears at least once (Zech 4:9) and possibly twice (Joel 1:14), where the MT has the Tetragram.

In March 2021, archaeologists announced the discovery of a Dead Sea Scroll, this time written in Hebrew, that also wrote the Tetragrammaton in the paleo-Hebrew script.