• Surprising New Evidence Comes to Light!
    The Watchtower—1978 | May 1

    • THE EGYPTIAN CLUE

      The clue consists of many fragments of an ancient papyrus scroll of Deuteronomy, with the museum listing Fouad Papyri Number 266. Though these fragments had been located in the 1940’s, they were inaccessible to the scholarly community for study.

      In 1950 the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures first published photographs of a number of these rare fragments. Still, throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s most experts did not have access to the actual fragments, and no other scholarly publication had reproduced photographs or made an analysis of them all. Finally, the 1971 volume of Études de Papyrologie did so. But what was so unusual about the fragments? And how do they bear on the use of God’s name?

      The Fouad 266 papyri were prepared in the second or the first century B.C.E. They are not in Hebrew but in Greek. Take a look at the writing in the samples of Fouad 266 reproduced below. Do you see that, even though the main text is in Greek, the Tetragrammaton in square Hebrew letters is used? So the copyist of this papyrus scroll also did not substitute the Greek words for “Lord” (Kyrios) or “God.” Rather, over 30 times he put​—in the midst of the Greek writing—​the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew letters!

      Dr. Paul E. Kahle of Oxford explained that these fragments contain “perhaps the most perfect Septuagint text of Deuteronomy that has come down to us.” In Studia Patristica, he added, “We have here in a papyrus scroll a Greek text which represents the text of the Septuagint in a more reliable form than Codex Vaticanus and was written more than 400 years before.” And it retained God’s personal name, as did the Greek fragments of the Twelve Prophets from the Judean desert. Both agreed.

      In the Journal of Biblical Literature (Vol. 79, pp. 111-118), Dr. Kahle surveyed the accumulating evidence regarding the use of the divine name among the Jews and concluded:

      “All Greek translations of the Bible made by Jews for Jews in pre-Christian times must have used, as the name of God, the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew characters and not [Kyrios], or abbreviations of it, such as we find in the Christian” copies of the Septuagint.

      This singling out of the divine name for careful preservation was manifest even in Hebrew-language texts from around the first century. In some of the Hebrew scrolls from the caves near the Dead Sea, the Tetragrammaton was written in red ink or an easily distinguished older type of Hebrew. J. P. Siegel commented on this:

      “When the Qumran manuscripts were first discovered more than twenty years ago, one of their more startling features was the appearance, in a limited group of texts, of the Tetragrammaton written in palaeo-Hebrew characters. . . . That this practice signifies a deep reverence for the Divine Name(s) is almost a truism.”​—Hebrew Union College Annual, 1971.

      Additionally, it has been reported that in first-century Jerusalem there was a Hebrew scroll of the five books of Moses with the Tetragrammaton in gold letters.​—Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 22, 1972, pp. 39-43.