The Nahal Hever Greek Minor Prophets Scroll and the Kaige Recension

In August 1952 a group of Taamireh Bedouin brought to Jerusalem a bundle of leather fragments written in Greek. They had come, it later became clear, from a cave high in the cliffs of Nahal Hever, a gorge that runs down to the western shore of the Dead Sea some way south of Ein Gedi. The fragments belonged to a scroll of the Twelve Minor Prophets, copied around the turn of the era, and when the young Dominican scholar Dominique Barthélemy examined them at the École Biblique he recognised that their Greek was neither the ordinary text of the Septuagint nor any of the later Jewish versions known from the Church Fathers. It was a revision of the old Greek translation, made by Jews in Palestine to bring it closer to the Hebrew text then in use. In an article of 1953 he called the scroll a “missing link” in the history of the Septuagint, and in a book of 1963 he gave the revising movement it represented the name by which it is still known: kaige.¹ This article describes the scroll, the caves in which it was hidden, the method by which it was revised, and the place it occupies between the first Greek translation of the Bible and the literal versions of the second century.²

The Place of Discovery

Nahal Hever and the Refuge Caves

Nahal Hever is one of several deep wadis that cut eastward through the Judaean Desert to the Dead Sea. Its walls rise several hundred metres on either side, and high in the cliffs are natural caves that can be reached only along narrow ledges or by rope. In the second century AD these caves were used as places of refuge by Jewish families fleeing the Roman army at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135.³ Two of them became famous. On the northern side of the gorge is the cave that Yigael Yadin’s expedition explored in 1960 and 1961 and that is known as the Cave of Letters, where letters sent in the name of Simon bar Kosiba, the archive of a woman named Babatha, and a hoard of bronze vessels were found.⁴ On the southern side is the cave the Israeli explorers named the Cave of Horror, because on its floor lay the skeletons of some forty men, women and children who had died there.⁵

Above both caves, on the plateau at the top of the cliffs, the remains of Roman camps are still visible. Their position leaves little doubt about what happened. The soldiers did not need to attack the caves; they needed only to watch the paths and wait. The refugees had brought with them what they valued: household goods, documents of property and marriage, coins, and in at least one case a scroll of scripture in Greek. That scroll was found in the Cave of Horror, which the archaeologists numbered Cave 8 of Nahal Hever, and from that number comes its scholarly siglum, 8HevXIIgr: Nahal Hever Cave 8, the Twelve Prophets, in Greek.⁶

From the Bedouin to the Archaeologists

The circumstances of 1952 were typical of the first decade of Dead Sea discoveries. After the finds at Qumran, which are described in the article on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Bedouin of the region began searching every cave they could reach, and they sold what they found through dealers in Bethlehem and Jerusalem to the Palestine Archaeological Museum and the École Biblique. Nahal Hever lay on the Israeli side of the armistice line, while the buyers were in Jordanian East Jerusalem, and the Bedouin were naturally reluctant to say exactly where they had been. For some years the Greek scroll and the documents sold with it were therefore of uncertain origin, and part of the material was catalogued under the name of a different wadi, Wadi Seiyal, a confusion that took decades to untangle.⁷

The question was settled in March 1961, when the Israeli survey of the Judaean Desert caves sent four expeditions into the canyons south of Ein Gedi. Expedition B, under the archaeologist Yohanan Aharoni, was assigned the southern cliff of Nahal Hever and the Cave of Horror. Among the debris of the cave, which the Bedouin had already disturbed, the team found further small fragments of a Greek leather scroll. The epigrapher Baruch Lifshitz published them in 1962, and they proved to come from the same manuscript of the Minor Prophets that Barthélemy had been studying in Jerusalem for nearly a decade.⁸⁹ The scroll that the dealers had sold thus had an archaeological home: it had been carried into the Cave of Horror by refugees of the revolt and left there when they died.

The Scroll

Contents and Condition

The Twelve Minor Prophets were traditionally copied in Jewish practice as a single book, the “Book of the Twelve”, written on one scroll.¹⁰ The Nahal Hever manuscript followed that practice. What survives is a series of fragments, some of them large enough to preserve several adjacent columns, from the books of Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Zechariah, with smaller pieces that may belong to others. The text was written on leather in columns of roughly forty-two to forty-five lines. The leather had suffered badly from damp and from the attentions of insects and rodents; edges are frayed, and many lines survive only in part. Even so, enough remains for the character of the translation to be studied in detail across several hundred verses.¹¹

The editors of the official publication, which appeared in 1990 as the eighth volume of the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, were Emanuel Tov, who prepared the text and its analysis, Robert Kraft, who contributed to the reconstruction, and Peter Parsons of Oxford, who wrote the palaeographical study. Their edition reconstructed the arrangement of the fragments column by column, and showed how much of each book could be placed with confidence.¹² The fragments themselves are now in the Israel Antiquities Authority collections in Jerusalem, and high-resolution images can be consulted in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library.¹³

Two Scribes and a Date

The scroll was not the work of a single copyist. Parsons identified two hands. The first, conventionally called Hand A, wrote most of the surviving columns in a rounded, upright Greek book-hand. In the later part of the scroll a second scribe, Hand B, took over, with letter forms that are more angular and somewhat less regular. Changes of hand of this kind are not unusual in ancient manuscripts and need not mean anything more than that the work was shared in a scriptorium or that a copyist was replaced partway through.¹⁴

Dating Greek handwriting of this period is an inexact science, because few securely dated literary manuscripts survive to provide comparisons. Barthélemy at first assigned the scroll to the middle of the first century AD. Parsons, comparing it with dated documentary papyri from Egypt, preferred a range from the later first century BC to the middle of the first century AD, and most scholars now accept a date around the turn of the era.¹⁵ The scroll was therefore already old, perhaps a century or more old, when it was carried into the Cave of Horror. That matters for its interpretation. The revision of the Greek text that it contains cannot be a reaction to developments of the second century AD; it must have been made earlier, in the generations before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

The Divine Name in Ancient Letters

One feature of the scroll attracts the attention of every reader. Where the Hebrew text has the four-letter name of God, the Tetragrammaton, the scribes did not write a Greek word such as kyrios, “Lord”, which is the rendering found in the great Christian codices of the fourth and fifth centuries.¹⁶ Instead they left a space in the Greek line and wrote the name in the old Hebrew script, the Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet that had been used in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah before the square Aramaic script replaced it. Both hands did this, though the forms of their letters differ, which suggests that the second scribe was not simply copying the shapes of the first.

The practice was not unique to this scroll. Some Qumran manuscripts written in the square Hebrew script also write the divine name in Palaeo-Hebrew, and later Greek fragments of the versions of Aquila and Symmachus found in the Cairo Geniza and elsewhere preserve the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters. The Church Father Origen, writing in the third century, remarked that in the most accurate Greek manuscripts the name was written in ancient Hebrew letters. Patrick Skehan, who surveyed the evidence in 1980, argued that such scribal treatment of the name belonged to a Jewish tradition of reverence for it, and that its replacement by kyrios in Christian copies was a secondary development.¹⁷ Whether the very first Greek translators of the third century BC wrote the name in Hebrew or used kyrios remains disputed, but the Nahal Hever scroll shows clearly what Jewish revisers in Palestine were doing around the time of Jesus.

The Old Greek and Its Revisers

The First Greek Translation

To understand what Barthélemy found, it is necessary to recall how the Greek Bible came into being. According to the Letter of Aristeas, the Law of Moses was translated into Greek in Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, in the first half of the third century BC, by seventy-two elders sent from Jerusalem. Whatever the legend’s details, scholars agree that the Pentateuch was translated in Egypt in the third century BC and that the remaining books followed over the next century and a half or more, by many hands and in many styles.¹⁸ The resulting collection, which Christians later called the Septuagint after the seventy translators of the legend, is better described in its earliest form as the Old Greek, to distinguish the original translations from the later revisions of them.¹⁹

The translators of the Old Greek were working from Hebrew manuscripts that did not always agree with the text later standardised by the rabbis and preserved by the Masoretes. They also translated with varying degrees of freedom. Some, such as the translator of the Pentateuch, kept close to the Hebrew while writing acceptable Greek; others, such as the translators of Job and Proverbs, paraphrased, abbreviated or expanded. As a result, by the first century BC the Greek Bible read by Jews in Egypt and elsewhere differed in many places from the Hebrew Bible read in Jerusalem, sometimes in small matters of wording and sometimes in whole passages.²⁰

The Pressure toward the Hebrew

In the last two centuries before the destruction of the Temple, one form of the Hebrew text, the ancestor of the Masoretic Text, gained growing authority among the scholars and priests of Jerusalem.²¹ It was not the only form of the text in circulation, as the variety of the Qumran scrolls shows, but it was the one that the leading circles of Judaean Judaism came to regard as standard. For Greek-speaking Jews in Palestine and beyond, this created a problem. Their Greek Bible did not match the Hebrew text that their teachers expounded. Arguments from scripture, whether between Jewish schools or later between Jews and Christians, depended on exact wording, and a Greek text that diverged from the authoritative Hebrew could not be relied upon.²²

The response was revision. Rather than make a wholly new translation, scholars took the existing Greek text and corrected it, verse by verse, against the Hebrew. Where the Old Greek had omitted something present in the Hebrew, they added it; where it had added something absent from the Hebrew, they removed it; where it had rendered a Hebrew word loosely, they substituted a more exact equivalent. The process did not happen once, but repeatedly, over a period of perhaps two centuries, and its later stages produced the literal version of Aquila in the second century AD.²³ Before 1952 this history could be reconstructed only from the fragments of the later versions quoted by Origen and other Christian writers. The Nahal Hever scroll provided, for the first time, a substantial manuscript of an early stage of the process.

Barthélemy's Discovery

A Missing Link

Dominique Barthélemy, born in 1921, was a member of the Dominican order and a member of the staff of the École Biblique in Jerusalem when the scroll arrived. He was already working on the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and had taken part in the publication of the first Qumran fragments. Comparing the Nahal Hever Greek with the standard text of the Septuagint, he saw at once that the two were related: the scroll was not an independent translation, because it shared with the Septuagint many distinctive renderings that no independent translator would have hit upon. Yet it also differed from the Septuagint systematically, and almost every difference brought the Greek closer to the Hebrew text of the Masoretic tradition.²⁴

His 1953 article in the Revue Biblique, titled in French “Rediscovery of a missing link in the history of the Septuagint”, set out the argument in brief. The scroll was a Jewish recension of the Old Greek, made in Palestine and in use there in the first century. It stood between the original translation and the work of Aquila, whom ancient sources describe as a convert to Judaism from Pontus who produced, around AD 130, a version so literal that it reproduced Hebrew grammatical particles one by one in Greek. Barthélemy suggested that Aquila had not worked from nothing; he had pushed further a method of revision already well established before him.²⁵²⁶

Les Devanciers d'Aquila

Ten years later Barthélemy published the full study, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, “The Predecessors of Aquila”, which appeared in 1963 in the supplements to the journal Vetus Testamentum. It is one of the most influential books in the modern study of the Greek Bible. In it Barthélemy set out a list of characteristic features of the revision found in the scroll, and then searched for those features in other Greek texts. He found them in a number of places where scholars had long noticed peculiarities without being able to explain them.²⁷

The most distinctive feature, and the one from which Barthélemy took his name for the group, was the rendering of the Hebrew particles gam and wegam, “also” and “and also”. The Old Greek translators usually rendered these by the simple Greek kai, “and” or “also”, when they rendered them at all. The revisers, wishing to show that a particular Hebrew word stood in the text, used the combination kai ge, literally “and indeed”. Because this rendering appeared in all the texts Barthélemy grouped together, he called them the kaige recension, or the kaige group.²⁸²⁹

The Method of the Revisers

Fixed Equivalents

The kaige revisers worked on a principle that modern translators would call formal equivalence carried to an extreme: each Hebrew word or particle should, as far as possible, be represented by one fixed Greek word, used consistently wherever the Hebrew word appeared. The principle had an obvious advantage for teachers and controversialists. A reader of the Greek could tell from the Greek word what Hebrew word stood behind it, and could therefore argue from the Greek as if from the Hebrew.³⁰

Barthélemy identified a series of such equivalents. The Hebrew word ʾîš, “man”, which in Hebrew idiom is also used in the sense of “each”, was rendered by the Greek anēr, “man”, even where the sense required “each” and the Old Greek had used hekastos. The longer Hebrew form of the first-person pronoun, ʾānōkî, was rendered by egō eimi, “I am”, in order to distinguish it from the shorter form ʾănî, rendered simply egō; the result was a Greek in which egō eimi could stand before a finite verb, producing what is grammatically a doubled expression. The Hebrew negative ʾên, “there is not”, was rendered by ouk estin even when the context called for a simple negative. The ram’s horn trumpet, the shofar, was rendered by keratinē, a word for a horn, to distinguish it from the metal trumpet that the Old Greek usually called by the same name, salpinx.³¹³²

Corrections of Content

The revisers were not concerned only with word-for-word equivalents. Where the Old Greek of the Minor Prophets had read a Hebrew text different from the Masoretic one, the Nahal Hever text usually adopts the reading of the Masoretic tradition. Where the Old Greek translator had misunderstood a rare Hebrew word, the revision substitutes a rendering closer to the meaning recognised in Jerusalem. Where the Old Greek had smoothed a difficult passage by paraphrase, the revision restores a literal rendering, even at the cost of elegance.³³

Tov’s analysis in the official edition quantified these tendencies. He found that the scroll agrees with the Old Greek in a large proportion of its words, which confirms that it is a revision rather than a new translation, but that its departures from the Old Greek go overwhelmingly in the direction of the Masoretic Text. In a minority of cases the revisers seem to have used a Hebrew text that differed slightly from the later Masoretic one, which is consistent with what the Qumran scrolls show of the state of the Hebrew text at the time: the proto-Masoretic tradition was dominant but not yet fixed in every letter.³⁴³⁵

A Hebrew Counterpart from Murabbaʿat

A useful comparison is offered by another scroll of the Minor Prophets found in the Judaean Desert. In 1955 Bedouin discovered, in a cave of Wadi Murabbaʿat some way north of Nahal Hever, a Hebrew scroll of the Twelve that had also been hidden during the Bar Kokhba revolt. Published in 1961 by Pierre Benoit, J. T. Milik and Roland de Vaux as part of the second volume of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, it preserves large parts of the books from Joel to Haggai, and its text is almost identical to that of the medieval Masoretic manuscripts.³⁶ The two scrolls, one Hebrew and one Greek, were thus in use in the same region at the same time. The Hebrew one shows the text that the Jewish leadership of the early second century regarded as authoritative; the Greek one shows how Greek-speaking Jews had adjusted their translation to match it.

The Kaige Group in Other Books

Thackeray's Divisions in Samuel and Kings

The most important of Barthélemy’s identifications concerned the books of Samuel and Kings, which the Septuagint calls the four books of Reigns. In 1907 the English scholar Henry St John Thackeray had observed that the Greek of these books was not uniform. Certain sections, which he labelled with Greek letters, showed a style quite different from the rest, with many of the peculiar renderings later associated with kaige. One section ran from the middle of 2 Samuel, at about chapter 10 or 11, to the beginning of 1 Kings, at chapter 2, verse 11; another ran from the end of 1 Kings, chapter 22, through 2 Kings. Thackeray had supposed that these sections were translated later than the rest by a different translator.³⁷

Barthélemy showed that the peculiar sections were not new translations but kaige revisions of the Old Greek, which in these parts had been entirely displaced in the main manuscript tradition. The original Old Greek of these sections survives, in a form itself somewhat revised, in a small group of manuscripts associated with the text used at Antioch, which scholars call the Antiochene or Lucianic text. The discovery transformed the study of the Greek books of Reigns, because it meant that the text printed in the standard editions for these chapters was not the earliest Greek at all, and that the Old Greek had to be recovered from secondary witnesses.³⁸³⁹

Theodotion and Daniel

The ancient Church knew of three Jewish Greek versions besides the Septuagint, associated with the names of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. All three were included in the Hexapla, the great six-column edition prepared by Origen in the first half of the third century.⁴⁰⁴¹ The Church Fathers placed Theodotion late in the second century and described his work as a revision of the Septuagint rather than a new version.⁴² Yet there was a long-standing puzzle. Readings that agree with “Theodotion” appear in Greek texts and in quotations that are older than the second century, including the book of Revelation and other early Christian writings.

Barthélemy’s solution was that the version known as Theodotion’s was itself part of the kaige tradition, and that its distinctive readings were older than the man to whom ancient writers attributed it. Scholars since have often spoken of a “proto-Theodotion” or of kaige-Theodotion. The most important Theodotionic text is the book of Daniel. The Old Greek of Daniel differed so much from the Hebrew and Aramaic text that the Church abandoned it, and from the third century onward the Greek Daniel read in Christian churches was the Theodotionic version.⁴³ The Old Greek Daniel survived only in a handful of witnesses, and the version that replaced it belongs, at least in part, to the same revising movement as the Nahal Hever scroll.⁴⁴

Other Members

Barthélemy and later scholars added further texts to the group: the Greek of Ruth, Lamentations and the Song of Songs; the passages of Job that Origen supplied, under a mark called the asterisk, from Theodotion to fill gaps in the shorter Old Greek; parts of the Greek of Jeremiah and Baruch; and the anonymous version of the Psalms that Origen called the Quinta, the “fifth” column of his materials. Not all of these attributions have been accepted. Later research has shown that the “kaige group” is not a single coherent edition produced by one school at one time, but a family of revisions sharing a common approach and a stock of common equivalents, applied with varying consistency to different books.⁴⁵⁴⁶

The Debate after Barthélemy

One Recension or a Tendency

Barthélemy wrote of the kaige recension as though it were a single, deliberate work, and he connected it with the Jewish schools of exegesis of the first century. He tentatively associated it with the circle of rabbinic scholars around Hillel and with the principles of interpretation attributed to them, which attended closely to the smallest words of scripture; in particular he suggested that the rendering of gam by kai ge reflected an interpretive rule by which such particles were held to include something additional in the meaning of a verse. The suggestion was attractive but difficult to prove, and few scholars now regard the link with any particular rabbinic school as established.⁴⁷⁴⁸

Subsequent research, by scholars including Tim McLay, Peter Gentry and Leonard Greenspoon, has tended to speak of a kaige tendency or tradition rather than a single recension. McLay argued in 1998 that the features listed by Barthélemy do not all occur together in every text assigned to the group, and that some appear in texts with no other connection to it. Gentry, working on the Greek of Job and Ecclesiastes, emphasised the gradual character of the revising process, in which successive scholars took up and extended the methods of their predecessors. Greenspoon warned against the loose use of the term “Septuagint” for every form of the Greek Bible, since the evidence of Nahal Hever showed how many different stages could lie behind a single Greek text.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

What Remains Agreed

Despite these refinements, the central conclusions that Barthélemy drew from the scroll have stood. There was a Jewish revision of the Old Greek in Palestine before the end of the first century AD. It sought to align the Greek with the proto-Masoretic Hebrew text. It employed a recognisable set of fixed equivalents, of which the rendering kai ge is the most conspicuous. It forms the background to the versions of Theodotion and Aquila, which carried the same principles further in the second century. And the existence of such revisions means that any Greek text of a biblical book must be examined to see whether it preserves the Old Greek or a later, corrected form.⁵²⁵³

The Scroll and the Early Church

Justin Martyr's Quotations

The Nahal Hever scroll also cast light on early Christian literature. Around the middle of the second century Justin Martyr, a Christian teacher from Samaria who had settled in Rome, wrote the Dialogue with Trypho, an account of a debate with a Jewish interlocutor about the interpretation of the prophets.⁵⁴ In the course of it Justin accuses the Jews of altering the scriptural text, and he quotes several prophetic passages at length, including the oracle of Micah in chapter 4 about the mountain of the house of the Lord and the nations beating their swords into ploughshares.⁵⁵

Barthélemy noticed that Justin’s long quotation of Micah does not follow the standard Septuagint. In several places it agrees with the Nahal Hever text against the Septuagint. Justin, it appears, had access to a Greek text of the Minor Prophets of the same kind as the scroll, perhaps one he had obtained from Jewish sources, and he used it in some of his quotations while using the Septuagint in others. The agreement showed that the revised Greek text was still current in the middle of the second century, and that it was known outside purely Jewish circles.⁵⁶⁵⁷

The Parting of Ways

The history of the Greek Bible after the first century is in part a history of divergence between Jews and Christians. Christians, who had adopted the Septuagint as their Old Testament and quoted it in their own writings, continued to use it. Jews, finding that Christians used the Greek text in argument against them, and preferring in any case a Greek that matched the Hebrew, turned increasingly to the revised versions and above all to Aquila. In the third century Origen, who was concerned that Christians should be able to argue with Jews on the basis of a text both sides accepted, collected the Jewish versions in the Hexapla and used them to mark the places where the Septuagint differed from the Hebrew.⁵⁸⁵⁹

The Nahal Hever scroll belongs to the period before this divergence was complete. It was a Jewish manuscript, written by Jewish scribes with the divine name in Hebrew letters, and it was carried into the desert by Jews fleeing a Roman army in the last great Jewish revolt of antiquity. Yet its text was known to a Christian writer of the same century, and its readings passed, through Theodotion and the Hexapla, into the Greek tradition of the Church.

Significance for the History of the Text

Evidence for the State of the Hebrew Text

For the history of the Hebrew Bible, the scroll is important because it is indirect evidence for the Hebrew text that the revisers regarded as authoritative. Since they corrected the Greek toward that text, their corrections show where it differed from the Hebrew used by the original translators. In nearly every case the revisers’ Hebrew is the proto-Masoretic text, which confirms that by the turn of the era this form of the text had become the standard in the circles responsible for the revision. Together with the Hebrew Minor Prophets scroll from Murabbaʿat and the biblical scrolls from Masada, it belongs to a body of evidence showing that the manuscripts used by Jews outside Qumran in the first and early second centuries were overwhelmingly of the proto-Masoretic type.⁶⁰⁶¹

Evidence for the Greek Bible

For the history of the Greek Bible, the scroll’s importance is greater still. It showed that the Greek text known from the Christian codices is not a single translation preserved unchanged from the third century BC, but a composite in which original translations and later revisions stand side by side. Editors of the critical Göttingen edition of the Septuagint, and of the Greek books of Reigns in particular, now routinely ask of every reading whether it belongs to the Old Greek or to a later stage of revision. The question had been raised before 1952, but the Nahal Hever scroll provided the evidence by which it could be answered.⁶²⁶³

It also changed the understanding of how the books of the Greek Bible related to one another. A reader of the Vatican or Alexandrian codex, described in the articles on Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus, encounters in the books of Reigns, in Daniel and elsewhere a Greek that is in fact a kaige revision, while in other books the same manuscript preserves the Old Greek. The Christian scribes who assembled these great Bibles drew on whatever texts were available to them, without always knowing their origins, and the codices therefore preserve a record of the whole history of revision.⁶⁴

Conservation and Study Today

The fragments of the scroll were kept for many years in the Palestine Archaeological Museum, later the Rockefeller Museum, in Jerusalem, and after 1967 passed into the care of the Israel Department of Antiquities, now the Israel Antiquities Authority. Like the other Judaean Desert manuscripts, they have been photographed several times, first in black and white in the 1950s and more recently with multispectral imaging, which can recover traces of ink invisible to the eye on darkened leather. The methods are described in the article on multispectral imaging and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Images of the Nahal Hever fragments are available in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, which allows readers to compare the surviving columns with the edition of 1990.⁶⁵

The official edition remains the standard reference. Tov’s analysis of the revision, Kraft’s reconstruction and Parsons’s palaeographical study together provide the basis on which every subsequent discussion of kaige is built. Barthélemy himself went on to a long career in textual criticism; he became professor at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, led the United Bible Societies’ Hebrew Old Testament Text Project, and wrote the multi-volume Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, before his death in 2002. His recognition, in his early thirties, of what the Bedouin fragments represented remains his best-known contribution.⁶⁶

Conclusion

The Greek Minor Prophets scroll from Nahal Hever is a modest object: a series of damaged leather fragments from a scroll that its owners carried into a desert cave in the second century and never brought out. Its importance lies in its text. It is the earliest substantial manuscript of a Jewish revision of the Greek Bible, made to bring the old Alexandrian translation into agreement with the Hebrew text that had become standard in Judaea. Through it Dominique Barthélemy was able to identify the kaige revision, to explain long-standing puzzles in the Greek of Samuel, Kings and Daniel, and to show that the versions of Theodotion and Aquila stood at the end of a tradition rather than at its beginning. The scroll thus stands at a meeting point in the history of the biblical text, between the Greek Bible of the Alexandrian Jews and the Greek Bible of the Church, and between the varied Hebrew texts of the Second Temple period and the single text later preserved by the Masoretes.⁶⁷⁶⁸

Notes

1. Dominique Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante”, Revue Biblique 60 (1953), 18–29. ↩
2. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
3. Grokipedia, “Bar Kokhba revolt”. ↩
4. Grokipedia, “Cave of Letters”. ↩
5. Yohanan Aharoni, “Expedition B: The Cave of Horror”, Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962), 186–199. ↩
6. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
7. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
8. Yohanan Aharoni, “Expedition B: The Cave of Horror”, Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962), 186–199. ↩
9. Baruch Lifshitz, “The Greek Documents from the Cave of Horror”, Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962), 201–207. ↩
10. Grokipedia, “Twelve Minor Prophets”. ↩
11. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
12. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
13. Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. ↩
14. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
15. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Tetragrammaton”. ↩
17. Patrick W. Skehan, “The Divine Name at Qumran, in the Masada Scroll, and in the Septuagint”, Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 13 (1980), 14–44. ↩
18. Grokipedia, “Septuagint”. ↩
19. Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Use and Abuse of the Term ‘LXX’ and Related Terminology in Recent Scholarship”, Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 20 (1987), 21–29. ↩
20. Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). ↩
21. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
22. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
23. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
24. Dominique Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante”, Revue Biblique 60 (1953), 18–29. ↩
25. Dominique Barthélemy, “Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante”, Revue Biblique 60 (1953), 18–29. ↩
26. Grokipedia, “Aquila of Sinope”. ↩
27. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
28. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
29. Tim McLay, “Kaige and Septuagint Research”, Textus 19 (1998), 127–139. ↩
30. Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). ↩
31. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
32. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
33. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
34. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
35. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
36. Pierre Benoit, J. T. Milik and Roland de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabbaʿât, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). ↩
37. Henry St John Thackeray, “The Greek Translators of the Four Books of Kings”, Journal of Theological Studies 8 (1907), 262–278. ↩
38. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
39. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
40. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
41. Grokipedia, “Origen”. ↩
42. Grokipedia, “Theodotion”. ↩
43. Grokipedia, “Book of Daniel”. ↩
44. Peter J. Gentry, “The Septuagint and the Text of the Old Testament”, Bulletin for Biblical Research 16 (2006), 193–218. ↩
45. Tim McLay, “Kaige and Septuagint Research”, Textus 19 (1998), 127–139. ↩
46. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
47. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
48. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
49. Tim McLay, “Kaige and Septuagint Research”, Textus 19 (1998), 127–139. ↩
50. Peter J. Gentry, “The Septuagint and the Text of the Old Testament”, Bulletin for Biblical Research 16 (2006), 193–218. ↩
51. Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Use and Abuse of the Term ‘LXX’ and Related Terminology in Recent Scholarship”, Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 20 (1987), 21–29. ↩
52. Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). ↩
53. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
54. Grokipedia, “Justin Martyr”. ↩
55. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chapters 71–73 and 109–110. ↩
56. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩
57. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chapters 71–73 and 109–110. ↩
58. Grokipedia, “Hexapla”. ↩
59. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
60. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd edn (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
61. Pierre Benoit, J. T. Milik and Roland de Vaux, Les Grottes de Murabbaʿât, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). ↩
62. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
63. Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015). ↩
64. Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
65. Israel Antiquities Authority, The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. ↩
66. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). ↩
67. Emanuel Tov, with the collaboration of R. A. Kraft and a contribution by P. J. Parsons, The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever (8ḤevXIIgr), Discoveries in the Judaean Desert VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). ↩
68. Dominique Barthélemy, Les Devanciers d’Aquila, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1963). ↩