event · E0413
Nash Papyrus פפירוס נאש
Four fragments of a single Hebrew papyrus sheet, acquired in Egypt in 1902 by W. L. Nash and presented to Cambridge University Library (MS Or.233), containing the Ten Commandments — in a text that blends the Shemot and Devarim versions — followed immediately by the opening of the Shema. W. F. Albright's classic 1937 study dated the hand to the Maccabean age, c. 150–100 BCE, making this the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscript for the half-century until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. The Decalogue-then-Shema sequence matches the daily Temple liturgy described in Mishnah Tamid 5:1, so it is best understood as a prayer or study text rather than a Torah scroll.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- פפירוס נאש
- Also known as
- Nash Papyrus of the Decalogue, Cambridge MS Or.233
- Era
- second-temple
II. When
- Traditional
- c. 3611–3661 AM (the academic date laid onto the AM scale) — the generations of the Maccabean kingdom and the early Zugot
- Civil (computed)
- 3611–3661 AM · 150–100 BCE
- Academic
- c. 150–100 BCE
- Date range
- c. 150–100 BCE — Albright's Maccabean-age palaeographic date; the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscript until the Dead Sea Scrolls
- Duration
- ≈50 years
- Precision
- approximate
IV. What
- Events
- The Dead Sea Scrolls
Why it matters
For fifty years this scrap of papyrus was the oldest Hebrew Bible text on earth — a thousand years older than the great Masoretic codices — and it earned that title only after a famous correction: early scholarship placed it in the second century CE, until Albright showed the script belonged to the Maccabean age, three centuries earlier. What it preserves is not a scroll but, apparently, a page of liturgy: the Aseret HaDibrot followed at once by Shema Yisrael, exactly the sequence the Mishnah says the priests recited each morning in the Temple. A Jew in Egypt around 150 BCE was praying a service whose order the Mishnah, centuries later, still remembers — the papyrus is a fragment of the siddur's prehistory.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| The papyrus — four fragments of one sheet, of unknown provenance but reportedly from the Fayum — was acquired in Egypt in 1902 by W. L. Nash, secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and presented to Cambridge University Library in 1903, where it is MS Or.233. It contains the Decalogue followed by the opening of the Shema, written in an early square Hebrew hand. | archaeology external | ★★★★★ |
|
| Its first editor, Stanley A. Cook, dated the hand to the second century CE; W. F. Albright's 1937 study — "A Biblical Fragment from the Maccabaean Age: The Nash Papyrus" — overturned that dating on palaeographic grounds and placed it c. 150–100 BCE. Albright's date stood, and until the Dead Sea Scrolls emerged (The Dead Sea Scrolls) the Nash Papyrus was the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscript by roughly a thousand years.
The incoming research batch dated this item 100–200 CE "following Albright" — the pre-Albright dating that Albright's own article, the batch's cited source, overturned. Corrected here to the Maccabean date; the "oldest before the Scrolls" superlative only works with the BCE date.
|
archaeology external | ★★★★★ |
|
| The text of the Decalogue blends the Shemot 20 and Devarim 5 versions (in places agreeing with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text), and the commandments are followed immediately by the opening of the Shema — matching the daily Temple service of Mishnah Tamid 5:1, in which the priests recited the Aseret HaDibrot and then the Shema. The sheet is therefore generally read as a liturgical or devotional text, not part of a Torah scroll — physical evidence that this liturgy was in Jewish hands in Egypt in the Hasmonean era.
The rabbinic sources also record that the Decalogue's place in daily liturgy outside the Temple was later abolished "because of the murmuring of the heretics" (Berakhot 12a) — the papyrus catches the practice while it lived.
|
biblical rabbinic archaeology | ★★★★☆ |