event · E0465
Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever מגילת תרי־עשר ביוונית מנחל חבר
A leather scroll of the Trei Asar (Minor Prophets) in Greek, found in the Cave of Horror at Nahal Hever — first fragments via Bedouin in the 1950s, more in the 1961 expedition to the cave, and further pieces in the Israel Antiquities Authority's desert operation announced in 2021. Written c. 50 BCE–50 CE, it is a revision of the old Greek translation corrected toward the Hebrew text — the "kaige" recension — and wherever the divine name occurs, the Greek scribe stopped and wrote the Tetragrammaton in paleo-Hebrew letters. Designated 8HevXIIgr, it is held by the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, kept at the Rockefeller Museum.
I. Who
- Hebrew
- מגילת תרי־עשר ביוונית מנחל חבר
- Also known as
- 8HevXIIgr, Nahal Hever Minor Prophets Scroll
- Era
- second-temple
II. When
- Traditional
- c. 3711–3810 AM — the manuscript's academic date laid onto the AM scale
- Civil (computed)
- 3711–3810 AM · 50 BCE – 50 CE
- Academic
- c. 50 BCE–50 CE (palaeographic; some argue for the later first century CE)
- Date range
- manuscript written c. 50 BCE–50 CE; hidden in the Cave of Horror during the Bar Kokhba revolt
- Duration
- ≈99 years
- Precision
- approximate
III. Where
- Places
- Nahal Hever
IV. What
- Events
- The Dead Sea Scrolls
Why it matters
Before the Temple fell, Greek-speaking Jews were already correcting their Greek Bible against the Hebrew — and this scroll is the proof. Its translation systematically revises the old Septuagint toward a Hebrew text close to the later Masoretic tradition, the first chapter of the process that runs to Aquila's rigidly literal translation and Chazal's cooling toward the Greek Bible. And it keeps one thing untranslated: at every mention of the divine name, the Greek column breaks into paleo-Hebrew letters — a Greek reader encountering God's name in a script centuries older than the text around it. A scroll of the prophets in Greek, hidden in a refuge cave by Jews fleeing Rome, is also its own portrait of the era: Greek on the tongue, Hebrew at the core.
V. How do we know
| Claim | Evidence | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fragments of the scroll reached scholars via Bedouin in the 1950s ("Seiyal collection"); the 1961 expedition under Yohanan Aharoni located more in the Cave of Horror (Cave 8) at Nahal Hever, fixing the provenance, and the Israel Antiquities Authority's Judean Desert operation announced further fragments in 2021. Designated 8HevXIIgr and published in DJD VIII (Tov, 1990), the scroll is held by the IAA in Jerusalem, kept at the Rockefeller Museum. Preserved passages run from Yonah through Zecharya. | archaeology external | ★★★★★ |
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| The scroll's text is not the old Septuagint but an early Jewish revision of it — the "kaige" recension — systematically corrected toward a Hebrew text close to the later Masoretic tradition. It is the key witness that such Hebraizing revision was underway by the turn of the era, the process that leads to the second-century translations of Aquila and Theodotion. | archaeology external | ★★★★★ |
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| Throughout the scroll the divine name is written in paleo-Hebrew characters embedded mid-line in the Greek text — at Yonah 3:3 and 4:2, Micha 1:1–3, Chavakuk 2:14–20, Tzefanya, and Zecharya — rather than rendered by the Greek kyrios. Together with Papyrus Fouad 266 (Papyrus Fouad 266), it shows that early Jewish copies of the Greek Bible preserved the Name itself, and that the familiar "Lord" of later Greek manuscripts is a subsequent development. | archaeology external | ★★★★★ | |
| The manuscript is dated palaeographically to roughly 50 BCE–50 CE (Roberts; Barthelemy argued the later first century CE), and was carried into the Cave of Horror by Bar Kokhba-era refugees — the cave that also held the remains of some forty men, women, and children who died in hiding. The scroll thus existed for several generations before the war that buried it.
The atlas dates the entity by manufacture per the existence-point rule; the deposit belongs to the revolt's end, c. 135 CE. The palaeographic range is genuinely debated within about a century.
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archaeology external | ★★★★☆ |