Nash papyrus
The Nash papyrus is a papyrus sheet made of four fragments from around 200-100 BC. On which the Ten Commandments are noted in Hebrew in a mixed form of Ex 20.2ff and Dtn 5.6ff as well as the beginning of the Shema Yisrael (Dtn 6.4f). Until 1947 it was considered the oldest known Bible manuscript .
Dating
In 1902 WL Nash bought the sheet in Egypt and donated it to Cambridge University , in whose library it is to this day. In 1903 Stanley A. Cook published and commented on the find in an archaeological journal. He dated the papyrus to 100–200 AD.
The archaeologist William Foxwell Albright, on the other hand, examined it palaeographically and therefore dated it in 1937 to the time of the Maccabees Wars (approx. 170 BC). The Hebraist Paul Kahle compared it with the previously known Dead Sea Scrolls and dated it in 1951 to the time before the destruction of the second Jerusalem Temple in 70.
The other Qumran writings found up to 1965 then confirmed the paleographic evidence on which Albright had relied, so that his dating has prevailed today.
Text version
The text differs in some places from the Masoretic Text , which was formed 1000 years later : In the introductory verse, the self-presentation of YHWH , the expression “from the slave house” for Egypt, which occurs in both biblical versions of the Decalogue, is missing. This is a possible reference to the place where the text was written.
The commandment do not break marriage does not precede the commandments of murder or robbery , and the Shema of Israel is introduced with an additional verse. Both differences are also known from manuscripts of the Septuagint , the first also from the writings of Philo of Alexandria and from the New Testament . However, since the text was written in Hebrew and found in Egypt, it is assumed that it is based on a Hebrew, not a Greek text form, which has been transmitted independently of the Masoretic text form and translated through the Septuagint.
Since the two texts on the sheet do not follow one another directly in Deuteronomy , the papyrus is not considered the remainder of a codex , but as an extract from it for educational or edifying purposes. It is believed that it was copied from a liturgical original. For both the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud taught the reading of the Decalogue before the Shema.
literature
- Burkitt, FC , The Hebrew Papyrus of the Ten Commandments (PDF; 346 kB), The Jewish Quarterly Review , 15 , 392–408 (1903)
- Stanley A. Cook: A Pre-Massoretic Biblical Papyrus . Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology 25 (1903), pp. 34-56
- William F. Albright: A Biblical Fragment from the Maccabean Age: The Nash Papyrus. Journal of Biblical Literature 56 (1937), pp. 145-176
- Paul Kahle: The Hebrew Manuscripts from the Cave (1951), p. 5f
- Ernst Würthwein: The text of the Old Testament , 4th edition 1973, p. 37
