Latest Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery! What Should We Know?

 

            The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-1940s was among the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20^th century. This discovery augmented the reliability of the Old Testament. 

            Recently additional fragments were discovered, “Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists have discovered fragments of an ancient biblical scroll as part of a four-year operation to excavate some 500 caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea,” reports Archaeology.org dated 17-March-2021.¹ This is the first time in more than 60 years that additional Dead Sea Scroll parchments were discovered. 

            The latest discovery includes verses from the Twelve Minor Prophets (specifically from Zechariah 8:16-17 and Nahum 1:5-6) written in ancient Greek.²

            What is the significance of the new discovery? Christianitytoday.com reports two interesting aspects: (1) A special treatment for the Tetragrammaton (the transliteration of the Hebrew name of God in four letters YHWH), and (2) Evidence of changing words to improve a new translation:³

...the newly discovered pieces show a special treatment for the four letters of God’s name, the Tetragrammaton (see Exodus 3:14–15). Instead of rendering the name in typical fashion with the Greek word Kyrios, the name of God is represented in Hebrew letters written right to left. It would be similar to us using the Hebrew letters יהוה (YHWH) or possibly the Latin DOMINUS in the middle of an English sentence.

This representation is significant because using specialized characters for the divine name has carried through to our modern Bibles. Most English Bibles represent the name as “the LORD” with small capital letters, rather than representing its supposed pronunciation Yahweh, as many scholars suggest. This substitution follows the ancient tradition of reading Adonai, a Hebrew word meaning “Lord,” or even HaShem “The Name,” in place of representing God’s name according to its sound.

Moreover, the lettering for God’s name is not typical of most of the other Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew manuscripts. It is an even older script, sometimes called paleo-Hebrew, which was mostly abandoned in everyday writing during the second temple period. Think of it as the difference between our modern Latin lettering and the calligraphic Fraktur or Gothic script, or possibly even like Greek letters. Putting these representations into a translated text provides both a foreignness to the writing and a type of reverence for the name’s uniqueness.

The second correlation we find in the new fragments is evidence of changing words to try to improve a new translation. The Minor Prophets scroll represents a revision of an older Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The original version was used widely by Greek-speaking Jews in the first century throughout the Mediterranean world, but at some point, a new translation became warranted.

For Zechariah 8:17, the Old Greek translated the first word in the Hebrew text (אִישׁ) as a distributive term meaning “each other, another,” which put at the end, similar to every major English version. For example, the NIV reads, “Do not plot evil against each other.”

In the new fragment, the same term is translated by a different Greek word at the beginning. Using an interlinear approach—finding a corresponding word without accounting for the context of its use—the verse starts by representing the same Hebrew word as “man.” It forms an overliteral translation: “As for a man, do not plot evil against his neighbor in your heart.”       

Endnotes:

¹https://www.archaeology.org/news/9530-210317-israel-dead-sea-scrolls

²https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/march-web-only/new-dead-sea-scrolls-discovery-bible-translation-israel.html

³Ibid.

Websites last accessed on 20^th May 2021.