The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part 7

as Dr. Cowley informs me, occurs in the tenth century and no doubt goes back to a much earlier epoch. As is well known, it was a peculiarity of the version of Aquila to write the Tetragrammaton in the archaic Hebrew letters instead of translating it by kyrios Lord; but neither the earlier nor later Hebrew forms of the Tetragrammaton, nor the Greek imitation of the later form, PIPI, has previously appeared in the text of a Greek manuscript of the Septuagint, except the Hexapla fragment published by C. Taylor, Cairo Palimpsests, p. 26. A decided tendency to omit the word kyrios was, however, observable in the early Oxyrhynchus papyrus (656), where in one passage a blank space was originally left in which the missing word was supplied by a second hand. Possibly the scribe of that papyrus or its archetype had Hebrew symbols before him which he did not understand, or the archetype had been intended to show the Hebrew symbols and they had not been filled in. At any rate, in the light of the present example, the question may be raised whether Origen’s statement (in Ps. ii) that ‘in the most accurate copies the (sacred) name is written in Hebrew characters’ was intended to apply, as is commonly assumed, only to the copies of Aquila’s version.

Apart from the substitution of the Tetragrammaton for kyrios, the text, though interesting, is not so far as it goes particularly notable. As usual, it evinces no pronounced affinities with any one of the chief extant manuscripts, but agrees here with one, there with another. In two passages, again (ll. 20 and 28), it sides with some of the cursives late, flowing script styles against the earlier manuscript evidence, in one of them (l. 20) having the support of citations in the New Testament and in Philo.

Verso.

Col. i.
[into his face a breath of] life; and the man became [a living soul]. And God planted a paradise in Eden [in] the east, and put there the [man] whom He had formed. And [out of the ground God made to grow]

Col. ii.
of every tree that is in the [paradise] you shall eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it. On the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. And said [ZZ] Tetragrammaton abbreviation God, "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make for him a helper like unto him." And [God] formed [yet]