The Nature and Use of This Blog AboutMSS

I have pointed to content on this blog in the LXX Scholarly Forum, a Yahoo Group. A poster to that group came here and plagiarized some of the content and then falsely attributed the plagiarism to me.

I want to make it clear, therefore, that you are welcome to read the fruits of scholarship in its early stages that you find on this blog. I ask, as the owner of the blog, that you not take any material away with you for quotation unless you have first discussed the use of the material you found here with me.

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Sigrid Peterson, Ph.D.
CCAT/CATSS Variants Project
University of Pennsylvania

Minor Prophets Page

Table 11: Order of books in the Hebrew and Greek (MSS ABS; V resembles MT) tradition compared with the contents of the scroll

Hebrew — preserved books — Greek
Ho Ho
Jl Am
Am XX Mi
Ob
Jo Ob
Mi XX XX Jo
Na XX XX Na
Ha XX XX Ha
Zp XX XX Zp
Hg [XX] [XX] Hg
Za XX XX Za
Ma Ma

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Note: The above table has been adapted from Table 11 in DJD VII: The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, Ed. Emanuel Tov, Robert A. Kraft, Peter J. Parsons. Table 11 is in A. Introduction, 8.

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Below is an experimental page that allows for viewing the Biblia Qumranica Volume 3 book on the Minor Prophets.

The following text is from my abridgment of the pages on the description of the GrMinor Prophets Scroll from the DJD Edition available on Google Books. That’s also how I adapted Table 11, above, from the same source. Here is my quoted, sometimes abridged, material. In it, find the account of how the question of whether all twelve prophets were included in the scroll, and in what order, was answered.

Naxal Xever 8 /Seiyal Collection

Greek Minor Prophets Scroll

(Kraft)
Description

3. Content and Scope

For the sake of simplicity, the following discussion assumes that we are dealing with a single manuscript written in two different hands. The evidence for and problems with such a hypothesis are discussed in A5.

Major and minor portions of 25 (or 26 . . .) columns have been preserved from Jo, Mi, Na, Ha, Zp and Za. Together with the reconstructed sections these books comprised 55 columns according to the reconstruction shown in Table 9 . . . .

Adding the numbers for the individual books . . . we reconstruct 33 1/2 columns for Hand A covering the following books: Jo, Mi, Na, Ha, Zp and Za. To these we add 3 columns for Hg between Zp and Za, even though no fragment of that book has been preserved. Altogether, for hand A 37 columns are calculated, to which 18 columns are added for hand B. This brings the tentative calculation of the scroll to at least 55 columns. This calculation is based on the assumptions that scribe B started to write exactly in the first column preserved in his handwriting, that is in Za 8. This assumption is made for the sake of convenience only, for if we assume that scribe B started with the first column after the last preserved fragment of hand A, we would have to add to the calculation another 3 1/2 cols between chaps. 3 and 8 since the columns of hand B contain less text. This assumption may well be correct if the identification of additional fragment 6 (Za4:7-8?) in the handwriting of scribe B is stable.
. . . .
The sequence of the books follows that of MT and not of the LXX. [In the case of Hg we are relatively confident that the book was contained between Zp and Za in the original scroll, since without it the structure ofthe scroll becomes more problematic. If Hg did not follow Zp in the scroll, Zp would be followed immediately by Za; in that case the join between the end of Zp and the start of Za would be unusually cramped.]
. . . .
Returning now to the width of the preserved columns, the length of the scroll can be calculated on the basis of the assumption that it contained all the books of the Minor Prophets. The data provided in Tables 4 and 6 point to an averageof 8.9 cm for each column [based on 17columns totalling 151 cm) and to and average of 1.7 cm for the margins between the columns. The average column with margin is thus 10.6 cm which would yield a scroll of either 9.64 meters (based on 91 columns) or 10.07 meters (based on 95 columns). The longest preserved scrolls from Qumran (inHebrew!) are 1QIs\a/ and 11QTemple (8.148 meters, but reconstructed to a full length of at least 8.75 meters). To assume a length of 10 meters for the Minor Prophets scroll is thus unusual but perhaps not impossible.

Note: This material has been adapted from the indicated section of the Introduction in DJD VII: The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, Ed. Emanuel Tov, Robert A. Kraft, Peter J. Parsons.

Since there is some current scholarly interest in the question of the correspondence of Qumran fragments with the Rahlfs and Goettingen Septuaginta, putting this abbreviated amount of text on the web would seem to be fair use.