Murabbaʿat Scrolls

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MURABBAʿAT SCROLLS

MURABBAʿAT SCROLLS , manuscripts found in 1951 and 1952 in caves in Wadi Murabbaʿat, which runs down to the Dead Sea from the west about 18 km. (11 mi.) south of Wadi Qumrān and some 25 km. (15 mi.) southeast of *Jerusalem. The presence of inscribed material in this area was first suspected in October 1951 when Taʿāmra Bedouin offered some fragments of skin with Hebrew and Greek writing to the Palestine Archeological Museum, Jerusalem. The site was visited early in 1952 by a team led by G.L. Harding and Père R. de Vaux, and they explored four caves, which yielded a considerable quantity of manuscript material. In March 1955 another cave was entered by local shepherds, who found a scroll of the Twelve Minor Prophets, containing substantial portions of the Hebrew text of nine of the 12 books.

General

The Murabbaʿat caves contained traces of human occupation at six distinct periods in antiquity – the Chalcolithic Age (4^th millennium b.c.e.), the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000–1500 b.c.e.), the Iron Age (more specifically the 8^th and 7^th centuries b.c.e.), the Hellenistic period, the Roman period, and the Arab period. From the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth of these periods written documents were discovered. From the third period, the era of the later kings of Judah, came a papyrus palimpsest inscribed in Phoenician (paleo-Hebrew) characters. The earlier writing seems to have been a letter; part of it runs: "… yahu says to you, 'I send greetings to your family. And now, do not believe every word that… tells you….'" The original writing was washed out and replaced by four lines of script, each containing a personal name followed by numbers (perhaps listing quantities of produce to be delivered by peasants to the royal exchequer). From the Hellenistic period come two inscribed potsherds (2^nd century b.c.e.). From the Arab period come some paper documents in Arabic and one or two Greek papyri. But the most numerous and by far the most interesting manuscripts come from the Roman period. These last are specially interesting because their presence at Murabbaʿat is due to the use made of the caves as outposts of guerrilla fighters during the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–5 c.e.). There are fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah on skin, a few tefillin fragments, and a piece of a mezuzah. The biblical texts are uniformly of protomasoretic type. The tefillin are of the type which became standard from the beginning of the second century c.e. onward, unlike those found at Qumrān, which belong to an earlier type and include the Ten Commandments. There is a fragment of a liturgical document in Hebrew and fragments of some literary works in Greek. There are quite a number of contracts and deeds of sale in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; of those which are intelligibly dated, the majority belong to the period preceding and during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. There are several lists of deliveries of grain and vegetables, one or two in Aramaic and/or Hebrew but mostly in Greek. Some papyrus fragments and one potsherd contain Latin writing.

The Ben Kosebah Letters

Chief interest attaches to some correspondence between Joshua b. Galgula, apparently leader of the Murabbaʿat guerrillas, and other insurgents. One letter comes to him from the administrators of Bet Mashiko (a village in southern Judea, it appears) informing him that a certain cow has changed ownership. Another letter comes from the defenders of En-Gedi, yet another from someone at Meẓad Ḥasidin, "the fortress of the saints," perhaps meaning Khirbat Qumrān – which is shown by archaeological excavation to have been occupied by insurgents during the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Two letters come to Joshua from the leader of the revolt in person, whose name is shown to have been Simeon b. Kosebah. (It was formerly known that the name Bar Kokhba, "son of the star," had been given him by R. Akiva and other supporters on the basis of Numbers 24:17, and the name Bar Koziba, "son of falsehood," given him by his opponents. His official designation "Simeon prince of Israel" is also found on coins of the Second Revolt.) One of the letters runs: "From Simeon b. Kosebah to Joshua b. Galgula and the people of Ha-Baruk (?), greeting! I call heaven to witness against me that if any of the Galileans who are with you is ill-treated, I will put fetters on your feet as I did to Beni Aflul. Simeon b. Kosebah in [his own person]." It is not known who the luckless Beni Aflul was, or what he had done; neither is there any information that would throw light on the Galileans mentioned (there is no reason to suppose that they were Christians). The second letter (which, like the other, is in Hebrew) runs: "From Simeon to Joshua b. Galgula, greeting! Take cognizance of the fact that you must arrange for five kors of wheat to be sent by the [members of] my household. So prepare for each of them his lodging place. Let them stay with you over the Sabbath. See to it that the heart of each is satisfied. Be brave and keep up the courage of the people of the place. Peace! I have ordered whosoever delivers his wheat to you to bring it the day after the Sabbath." Plainly Simeon b. Kosebah was a man of peremptory temperament, a quality no doubt desirable in the leader of a revolt. With this requisition of wheat it is possible to correlate the lists of grain and vegetables discovered in the same caves. The Murabbaʿatcaves seem to have been the last redoubt of Joshua and his men and their families. The Romans pursued them there and wiped them out, as they did to their comrades in Naḥal Ḥever. Some of the manuscripts bear signs of having been violently torn up by the invaders.

Linguistic Importance

The Murabbaʿat scrolls provide evidence that the inhabitants of Judea were trilingual at the time of the Second Revolt as they had been in the Herodian period: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek were used by Jews with equal facility. One Aramaic manuscript of earlier date than most (55–56 c.e.) contains the name of the Emperor Nero spelt in such a way as to yield the total 666 (nrwn qsr) – a pointer to the "number of the beast" in Revelation 13:18.