The Dead Sea Scrolls contain much material relevant to the study of the Minor Prophets. There are eight Minor Prophets scrolls from the Dead Sea Scrolls, plus some Minor Prophets scrolls from other locations in the Judean Desert, plus some Dead Sea Scrolls that transmit commentaries on the Minor Prophets. But what do we mean by “Minor Prophets scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls”? I mean a scroll that exhibits text from the Minor Prophets but not the entirety of the Minor Prophets, not even text from every book of the Minor Prophets. Indeed, there is no Dead Sea Scroll that contains—as part of the preserved portion of a single scroll—text from every one of the Minor Prophets, all twelve. Some of these scrolls may have at one time contained all twelve prophets, most probably didn’t. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The scholarly article you should read to get up to speed is this one from 2015 by Mika Pajunen and Hanne von Weissenberg. As you probably know, there were eleven caves around Qumran in which scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and 1950s. Cave 4 contained 7 scrolls of the Minor Prophets. These were all published by Russell Fuller in DJD 15 (1997). Cave 5 contained 1 scroll of the Minor Prophets. This one was published in DJD 3 (1962). Another location, not at Qumran, produced 1 scroll of the Minor Prophets. This location is called Murabba’at, about 15 miles south of Qumran. This scroll was published in DJD 2 (1961). Moreover, a couple of the fragments from Cave 4 that were published in DJD 15 as part of one of the seven scrolls presented in that volume are now known to be pieces of different scrolls. This applies to two fragments (a Malachi fragment and a Micah fragment). Let’s classify these as two new scrolls. So now we’re up to 11 scrolls. There are more scrolls of the Minor Prophets—unprovenanced artifacts, meaning that these scrolls have made their appearance into public view in recent decades (mostly in the 21st century) and in the hands of collectors who have claimed that the fragments ultimately derive from the Qumran caves or some such. Often these fragments are proven to be forgeries, but not always. There is one Minor Prophets fragment in this category, in the Schøyen collection, a fragment of Joel, that is generally recognized (I think) as genuine—or, at least, not yet proven to be a forgery. A few other fragments of the Minor Prophets have been determined to be forgeries (see esp. ## 78, 80, 81 here). I have not yet been able to read this academic article on “Fake Dead Sea Scrolls.” Now we’ve got 12 scrolls of the Minor Prophets. Finally, there is 4Q168, published in DJD 5 (1968) under the title “Commentary on Micah (?).” The parenthetical question mark is part of the title. But all that is preserved of this scroll is biblical text, not commentary, and it could be a scroll of Micah, as suggested in DJD 39 (2002), when it is listed as a scroll of the Minor Prophets, with the name “4QMic? (or: 4QpMic?)”; that is, DJD 39 suggests two possibilities: either it is a scroll of Micah (4QMic) or it is a pesher (commentary) on Micah (4QpMic). If it’s a scroll of Micah… That makes 13 copies of some portion of the Minor Prophets. But wait, there’s more! We haven’t talked about the pesharim. Well, I did just mention one possible pesher. Pesher is a Hebrew word that means “commentary” or “interpretation.” Pesharim is the plural form of the noun. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are commentaries—pesharim—for some of the prophetic writings, including Isaiah and Psalms and several of the books of the Minor Prophets: Hosea (2 of these), Micah (1 or 2 of these), Nahum (1), Habakkuk (1), Zephaniah (2), and maybe Malachi (1, if that’s what 4Q253a is)—7–9 commentaries on 5 or 6 of the Minor Prophets. All of the pesharim were published in DJD 5. Textual Value of These Scrolls Does all this manuscript evidence for the Minor Prophets help us to arrive at a better text of the Minor Prophets than had been possible before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century, when our Hebrew evidence was limited to the Masoretic Text? No, not really. Here is Emanuel Tov’s evaluation from 2019, for some decades now the world’s leading scholar of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The ancient Hebrew material from the Judean Desert is valuable but, as a rule, it is not of major importance for identifying presumably original readings. The Murabba‘at scroll is proto-Masoretic, and therefore the number of its divergences from MT is very small. The Qumran scrolls contain mainly secondary readings. (here, p. 130) This is the general rule when it comes to the Minor Prophets scrolls at Qumran: does not help to reconstruct a better text of the Minor Prophets. There are exceptions, and immediately after articulating the general rule Tov cites a possible exception as the reading “sword” at Habakkuk 1:17. Besides that there are other interesting readings, some of which I’ll mention in a post sometime. If the Dead Sea Scrolls don’t provide a better text for the Minor Prophets, what is the value of studying them? One answer: to learn about the development of the collection of the Minor Prophets. Minor Prophets Scrolls? Is it right to call the Cave 4 scrolls “Minor Prophets scrolls”? Sorta, but we require nuance. Certainly all of the scrolls identified as “Minor Prophets scrolls” contain biblical text from the Minor Prophets, but none of them contain all 12 of the Minor Prophets, and several of them might not ever have done so. Indeed, several of them currently preserve a single prophet of the Minor Prophets and may originally have done so, as well. * 4QXIId (4Q79) consists of two small fragments of Hosea 1:6–2:5 * 4QXIIf (4Q81) consists of four fragments of the first chapter of Jonah * 5QAmos (5Q4) contains only Amos * There is a stray fragment of Malachi that perhaps formed its own scroll (frg. 35 of 4QXIIc) * There is a Micah fragment that perhaps formed its own scroll (frg. 5 of 4QXIIf) * There is a Joel fragment in the Schøyen collection * And there is the “pesher” (4Q168) that contains only the biblical text of Micah, and therefore was possibly not a pesher but a copy of Micah. That’s 7 of the 13 (possible) scrolls of the Minor Prophets—more than half—that currently attest only a single prophetic voice. What about the other six scrolls? Half of them preserve two books each: * 4QXIIa (4Q76) Malachi, Jonah * 4QXIIb (4Q77) Zephaniah, Haggai * 4QXIIe (4Q80) Haggai, Zechariah Note that everyone seems agreed these days that 4QXIIa features an unfamiliar sequence for the books, in which Malachi is not the last book on the scroll but is followed by something. The original editor, Russell Fuller, suggested that Jonah immediately follows Malachi, but this suggestion has received some pushback. More recently Pajunen and von Weissenberg suggested that Jonah did follow Malachi, but not immediately, but something came between them. At any rate, the scroll attests a previously unknown sequence for the Minor Prophets. One scroll preserves four books. * 4QXIIc (4Q78) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Zephaniah And two scrolls preserve so many of the Minor Prophets—ten apiece—that they probably originally contained the whole collection. * 4QXIIg (4Q82): Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah. * MurXII (Mur88), the copy from Wadi Murabba’at: Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah. The Hebrew manuscripts with the largest number of attested books of the Twelve are 4QXIIg and MurXII. Manuscript 4QXIIg contains fragmentary remains of ten books. The format of this scroll differs markedly from 4Q76, and it has almost twice as many characters (corrected letter spaces) in an average line as 4Q76, and thirty or more lines per column. Manuscript MurXII has a third more letters on an average line than 4Q76 and thirty-six lines per column. These are manuscripts that may have included all or most of the books of the Twelve, and their material format attests to this. Most of the Qumran manuscripts, however, are much smaller in size, and they probably did not contain all books of the twelve. (Pajunen and von Weissenberg 2015: 750) The other thing that can be known with certainty is that Malachi was followed by another composition [in 4Q76], but most likely not directly by Jonah. Thus, there is positive evidence for an ancient scroll—one of the earliest textual witnesses—in which Malachi is not the last book in a scroll containing several prophetic books and in which it did not form the conclusion of the Twelve. Quotations Besides all this, there are quotations of the Minor Prophets in other Dead Sea Scrolls. If we wanted to do an exhaustive presentation of these quotations, I would start with the lists in this volume by Lange and Weigold—but since it mixes up allusions and quotations, we would have to check each citation to see if it really is a quotation. I am not going to put that effort into the task right now, so let me just point you to a single Dead Sea Scroll, one of the sectarian scrolls, called the Damascus Document, which was found both in the caves at Qumran and in the Cairo Genizah. It is abbreviated CD (Cairo Damascus). There are several biblical quotations in this scroll, including seven from the Minor Prophets. I have detailed these below. Book-by-Book Breakdown Here is the breakdown by biblical prophet: Hosea: 3 scrolls (4QXIIc, 4QXIId, 4QXIIg), plus 2 pesharim, plus one CD quotation (Hos 4:16 in CD col. 1) Joel: 4 scrolls, (4QXIIc, 4QXIIg, MurXII, Schøyen fragment) Amos: 4 scrolls (4QXIIc, 4QXIIg, 5QAmos, MurXII), plus two CD quotations (Amos 5:26–27; 9:11 in CD col. 7) Obadiah: 2 scrolls (4QXIIg, MurXII) Jonah: 4 scrolls (4QXIIa, 4QXIIf, 4QXIIg, MurXII) Micah: 4 scrolls
