SCRIBAL PRACTICES AND APPROACHE S ... - Emanuel Tov

APPENDIX 4
THE GREEK TEXTS FROM THE JUDEAN DESERT 346
The Greek texts from the Judean Desert constitute merely a small percentage of the texts found in the area; the best
known are Hebrew and Aramaic texts, especially those found at Qumran. However, the Greek texts are by no means
negligible, since at several sites their number equals that of the Hebrew/Aramaic texts, and at one site they even
constitute the majority. Thus, while the overall number of Greek texts found at Qumran may be negligible, this is
not the case for cave 7 where all 19 items constitute Greek papyri. This cave thus witnesses activity in the Greek
language; it is all of a literary nature, since probably all the fragments found in this cave are non-documentary.
Turning now to absolute numbers of texts, a word of caution is in order. While acknowledging that we can
only refer to the numbers of texts that have survived, it should be recognized that there is no reason to assume that a
larger or smaller percentage of Greek texts perished than documents in other languages. Comparative statistics of the
various extant texts should therefore be considered legitimate. The majority of the texts found in the Judean Desert
are Semitic, with Hebrew being the predominant language, but with the presence also of Aramaic. The Qumran
corpus consists of remnants of some 930 compositions. Of these, some 150 are in Aramaic (including 17 Nabatean-
Aramaic texts), 27 in Greek, and the remainder are in Hebrew (including texts written in one of the Cryptic scripts
and in paleo-Hebrew). The Greek texts in the Qumran corpus thus comprise a very small segment of the complete
corpus, namely 3%. This small per-centage is matched only by the finds in Wadi Daliyeh, beyond the Judean
Desert, while Greek texts were found in much larger proportions at all other sites in the Judean Desert. Because of
the fragmentary state of many texts, especially papyri, statistics for these sites can only be approximate: 347
TABLE 1: Greek Texts from the Judean Desert
Sites (Listed from North to South) Total Number of Texts
(Leather, Papyrus)
Greek Texts Percentage of Total
Texts
Wadi Daliyeh 29 1+ 3
Jericho 30 17+ 56+
Qumran 930 27 3
Wadi Nar 4 2 50
Wadi Ghweir 2 1 50
Wadi Murabba>at 158 71 45
Wadi Sdeir 4 2 50
Nah≥al H≥ever 348 157+ 55+ 35+
Nah≥al Mishmar 3 1 33
Nah≥al S≥e