The Nash Papyrus

The Nash Papyrus

The Nash Papyrus is a collection of four papyrus fragments acquired in Egypt in 1902, inscribed with a Hebrew text which mainly contains the Ten Commandments and the first part of the Shema Yisrael prayer, [ Hear, O Israel in Deuteronomy 6: 4] in a form that differs substantially from the later, canonical Masoretic text and is in parts more similar to the chronologically closer Septuagint. It has been suggested that the text might have been the daily worship of a Jew living in Egypt at the time. The fragments comprise a single sheet and are not part of a scroll. The papyrus is of unknown provenance, although it is allegedly from Fayyum in Egypt.

The text was first described by Stanley A. Cook in 1903. Though dated by Cook to the 2nd century CE, subsequent reappraisals have pushed the date of the fragments back to about 150–100 BC. The papyrus was by far the oldest Hebrew manuscript fragment known at that time, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. The papyrus fragments were acquired by W. L. Nash (Walter Llewellyn Nash), the secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology. He presented them to Cambridge University Library in 1903.

Contents

Twenty-four lines long, with a few letters missing at each edge, the papyrus contains the Ten Commandments in Hebrew and a short middle text, followed by the start of the Shema Yisrael prayer. The text of the Ten Commandments combines parts of the version from (Exodus 20:2–17) with parts from (Deuteronomy 5:6–21). A curiosity is its omission of the phrase “house of bondage”, used in both versions, about Egypt – perhaps a reflection of where the papyrus was composed.

Likely use

According to the Talmud it was once customary to read the Ten Commandments before saying the Shema. As Burkitt put it, “it is therefore reasonable to conjecture that this Papyrus contains the daily worship of a pious Egyptian Jew, who lived before the custom came to an end”.