Minor Prophets Scroll from the Cave of Horrors [13:40]

Transcript

Welcome to another special edition of Daily Dose of Septuagint. And today we’re going to be going back to the Judean Desert and some of the caves that were found there and take a look at the minor prophet scroll from the Cave of Horrors. This will be a lot of fun, although that’s a terrifying sounding name. So today, we’re going to introduce the kind of basic idea here, do a little bit of translation work, then we’ll come back and do a bit more in future videos.

If you remember a few months back, we took a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in Greek. These were the scrolls that were found in Qumran, and we looked at a few of those. Of course, most of the findings there at Qumran, which we traditionally called the Dead Sea Scrolls, are in Hebrew, a few in Aramaic, but a few were in Greek. And so we played around with those previously.

But of course, it’s not just Qumran. There were actually other discoveries alongside the Dead Sea that are broadly part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They just weren’t found at Qumran. So if you go a bit farther south, you’ll see there’s a cave in Wadi Murabat where some Hebrew manuscripts were found. And so if you’ve ever done any work on the Hebrew Bible, you may be familiar with those.

If you go yet further south, there’s not only En Gedi, closer to the shoreline, but also Nal, where some caves were found as well. And that will be our focus for this video and a few others.

So what’s going on here? So Nal means river. Nah is this wadi. That is a river that is sometimes flowing, sometimes dry, and it feeds the Dead Sea. As with many of them in the Judean Desert on the western side of the Dead Sea, you have these nice cliffs and hills. And roughly in 1953 or so, shortly after the discovery of Qumran, but in the same sort of neck of the woods, if you will, the same kind of effort, some Bedouins found these caves. And it appears that these caves were used by some Jewish refugees basically in the Bar Kokhba revolt.

That is the sort of final big battle between the Romans and the remnant of the Jewish people. Of course, AD 70 was the first Jewish war and then, you know, ultimately ending in AD 135. You have the Bar Kokhba revolt which was put down by the Romans. But it appears that some of these refugees fled to a few of these caves on this river, and one of them is going to be our focus today.

Ultimately, after they discovered and you know you had different things found here, Israel started exploring these caves. This is a picture of some of the excavations that took place in the early 1960s by a handful of archaeologists. And in the Cave of Letters, you found a handful of different artifacts from this period and much earlier, but our focus is going to be the Cave of Horrors.

Now, the Cave of Horrors is named that because during the excavation, inside it was found the skeletons of about 40 men, women, and children that apparently hid out in those caves running away from the Romans, of course, and ultimately died in that revolt. In fact, we know the names of some of them due to some broken pottery, some ostraca that included their names. So, they fled to these caves and that’s why it’s called the Cave of Horrors because you have all of these skeletons and so forth.

Now, I couldn’t find any pictures inside the cave sadly. I looked, but this is one from biblewalks.com. It’s from really a monument that was put near the cave. It’s been vandalized since then. You can see it’s sort of been broken down a bit, but it’s honoring the people who lived and ultimately died there. And so, that’s the name Cave of Horrors. Kind of a sad situation, but they took with them at least one biblical manuscript.

And so that’s going to be our focus, the minor prophet scroll that was found buried in that particular cave. And somewhat confusingly, it is named 8. That’s the eighth cave from this particular river. And it’s the 12 prophets, but it’s in Greek. So 8v12 Greek is its typical name. You can see it shares some of the attributes of the Qumran naming which would be like 4Q1 175 or something like that. So it’s in that same kind of nomenclature, but you can just remember it as the minor prophet scroll from the Cave of Horrors.

So let’s get into some of the details here. First off, it is a Greek manuscript and it is in RO format. You can, in fact, if you looked on the prior sort of view, it’s multiple columns. It is labeled RS 943 in the critical edition. It’s very, very important. It’s dated to about 100 BC upwards of 100 AD. It clearly predates that group of Jewish rebels who had fled to the hills. There is some debate based on the paleography as to how far back to push it. I tend to think it’s probably pre-Christian.

It may be roughly contemporaneous with, but is definitely separate from the sort of broader Christian movement there. So it’s quite an old scroll of the Greek version of the 12 prophets. As mentioned, it was buried in the Cave of Horrors. Part of it was burned a bit. You can sort of see that when you look at the fragments. It was discovered, the cave was discovered in 1948, as mentioned, or early 1950s. There’s some debate on that.

It was acquired, the scroll at least was acquired by the Palestine Archaeological Museum, which is now known as the Rockefeller Museum post the start of that excavation period. It was acquired by them in the early 1950s as part of the Seal Collection. And initially, the text was published by Dominique Barthel, and we’ll sort of learn more about him in the next video on this in 1963, and it was actually quite instrumental in one of his theories about the development of the old Greek form. A more detailed study was carried out by Emanuel Tov in 1990, including the sort of standard critical edition that we have today. So that’s some of the background on this particular scroll.

Let’s take a look at one of the fragments. I’ve just picked one from Zechariah here. And the first thing we’ll point out, and this is really quite fascinating, is the use of Paleo-Hebrew. And so you can see that on your screen here. You can actually see a bit down here. We’ll study some more of this next time.

This represents the divine name, the Tetragrammaton. Now if you ever study Hebrew, you’re used to seeing it like this in the square or Aramaic script. That’s what you’ll find if you purchase, for instance, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. You’ll see that sometimes in other places as well. But whoever did this scroll is using the old school script, the Paleo-Hebrew script or the Phoenician script. And it looks like this. So this is the Yod Hey Vav Hey, and you can see that in the sort of stylized form on screen. So that’s a pretty interesting feature of this manuscript.

There’s some debate about how this may have played out. Some have argued that the scribe is, you know, writing it in Greek and so they do their Greek stuff. They leave a blank space and then they continue going and then someone else comes back in and inks that in. That is what we saw in some other Qumran scrolls where they either use the asterisk. We saw that in prior videos, the four little asterisks or some other form. That’s one option.

The other option is actually the same scribe did it as he went, and one of the reasons why is that it fits so nicely. You can see the spacing is just perfect pretty much everywhere you see it. Whereas a lot of times when you see the scribe leave a gap and it’s got to be filled in later, they might not either give enough room for it or maybe they give too much room for it. And so some have argued that actually the scribe, whoever was doing this in Greek, was writing in Greek and then actually just went left to right. Actually, perhaps whether they knew Paleo-Hebrew or not, they knew what it looked like and so they wrote it in left to right. So some have argued that as well.

I don’t know what the final answer is. Either way, it’s quite interesting that the Paleo-Hebrew is used and that’s one of the reasons why everyone sort of generally agrees that this is a pre-Christian copy because you would expect Kyrios to be used here instead of the Paleo-Hebrew script. So, that’s pretty interesting. Pretty fun stuff.

Let’s just do a little bit of reading. Again, this is from Zechariah 9, verses 1 and 2. Of course, Zechariah 9 is a pretty interesting passage once you get to verses 9 and 10, of course, with the riding in on the donkey. I’m not sure most of that has survived, but we can just take a look, just get our feet wet in the handwriting. Notice it is quite clean, pretty easy to read here. Part of it is, of course, broken off. And so, I’ll have to supply some words to help us make some sense.

We’re going to pick up on this second line here on the screen, and then I’ll throw it up here in a second. So, there actually is a lambda here. It’s partly cut off. We start with layma or lema. So, that’s going to be like a saying, something like that. And then lagu. So, it’s a layma lagu, it’s a saying of the word of the Lord here. So let me put that up on screen. So layma lagu and then your Tetragrammaton. Now you can’t make out most of the rest of it. You can sort of see an epsilon here. There is an n. So that’s your preposition in and then the sort of critical edition argues that even though it’s missing here, the gay cedro. So this is a, you know, something like a revelatory word of the Lord in or against cedro is typically how that is reconstructed against this particular land.

Next line kai, it’s pretty straightforward and then damascus. So that’s going to be Damascus. Notice the genitive singular ending there. And then we see a cut and you can’t make out really the rest of it. And so here’s how it’s been reconstructed. So you got your kai, Damascu, and Damascus, Katapalus. And so that’s going to be something like rest or repose. And it’s going to be his rest or repose. And then the start here of a new word. So we got to go down to the next line. So it’s ai.

So that’s not going to be a hottie here. It’s going to be dati. So we can just throw that up here. So the d continues with the hotti. So dati. It’s therefore something to that effect or because would probably be a better fit here. And then we have a toe. So your dative singular masculine article there. Notice there’s no Yod here. Sometimes you might see a Yod written adscript but not here. You just have to supply it. And so this would be Lord in the dative.

Of course, it’s Paleo-Hebrew here. So because something is to the Lord. And what is to the Lord? Now you can see an offa. Now you can probably fill in the rest. That’s going to be something related to the I. So it’s aos. So the eye is to the Lord. Something to that effect. So that’s going to be your subject to the Lord is the eye. And then how are we going to finish this? Well, we see a thropone here. Well, I don’t know of any other word that ends with a thropone other than anthropone. And that’s why most scholars put the on here. It’s somewhere out in the broken bit. So it’s the eye of men is to the Lord or to the Lord is the eye of mankind. Something like that.

Then we have another kai. Actually, you notice they put a little spaces in here. It’s kind of helpful. You do see a little bit more. I mean, it’s still scriptio continua but they do have some generous little spaces there. I kind of like that for 100 BC. That’s pretty cool. So kai and then we have poson here. You got your lunate sigma plus your omega and all or all the ones. Now there’s a word that’s missing here typically based on the Hebrew it’s supplied here is fulon. So it’s going to be all the tribes. That’s how we would sort of reflect that. Next line Israel. To all the tribes of Israel. So basically the eye of all of mankind and all the tribes of Israel are to the Lord. All right. So that’s the end of verse one.

Next verse we pick up with kai and then actually sorry skipped a line kai and then we have a g here and then something. So let’s see what that could be. Kai g. So, and indeed Emoth and so that’s a transliteration of kamoth or that’s supplied here typically reconstructed from either the old Greek or the Hebrew that means to border upon something and then the start of the next word au. Now you see that it’s finished with the alaine here. So borders it, that is this land.

Then we have ty tias. So that’s ty, the ancient biblical city kai. So, and then you can probably guess he was always buddied up with Ty. It’s always going to be Sidon, but here it’s spelled with the Ei as opposed to just an I. So, it’s aligned. And then we have Diat once again supplied by your, you know, people who are trying to reconstruct this dati. And then Fonason, nice little verb there.

And then fold. And so that’s going to be because they think very highly of themselves by implication. Something to that effect. From neto means to think about yourself or to esteem yourself to have thoughts, and so it’s going to be a judgment against these opponents of Israel, uh, because of their thinking and that kind of thing. So just uh trying to get our feet wet with the script here.

Hopefully this has been fun; really interesting to see the Paleo-Hebrew tetragrammaton and so on. Uh, in the next episode, we’re going to come back and talk about how, uh, one of the reasons why this particular manuscript has proven to be so influential on the Septuagint world, uh, 12 Greek, is that it shows, and if you actually look up the passage that we just did in say Ralph Sanhar, you’ll see it’s quite different.

There is a notable Hebraizing, or Hebraizing, uh, you know, tendency of this particular scribe or this particular manuscript where, as opposed to sticking with what we see in the old Greek, it has apparently been modified back closer to some ancient Hebrew text that is pretty close to the protoeretic, and that’s why this has been quite interesting in the Septuagint world. So we’re going to talk about that more next time. We’ll take a look at some other passages and sort of get a feel for that.

But thanks for tuning in. Hopefully this has been a fun little getting our feet wet into the cave of horror. So we’ll see you next time.

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