The Nahum Commentary or Pesher Nahum, labelled 4QpNah (Cave 4, Qumran, pesher, Nahum) or 4Q169, was among the
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the ...
in
cave 4 of
Qumran
Qumran ( he, קומראן; ar, خربة قمران ') is an archaeological site in the West Bank managed by Israel's Qumran National Park. It is located on a dry marl plateau about from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, near the Israeli ...
that was discovered in August 1952. The ''
editio princeps'' of the text is to be found in
DJD V., edited by
John Allegro
John Marco Allegro (17 February 1923 – 17 February 1988) was an English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. He was a populariser of the Dead Sea Scrolls through his books and radio broadcasts. He was the editor of some of the most fam ...
. The text is described thus: 'one of the "continuous
pesharim" from Qumran, successive verses from the biblical
Book of Nahum
The Book of Nahum is the seventh book of the 12 minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible. It is attributed to the prophet Nahum, and was probably written in Jerusalem in the 7th century BC.
Background
Josephus places Nahum during the reign of Jotham ...
are interpreted as reflecting historical realities of the 1st century BCE."
Text
The most clearly historical references in the text can be found in Fragments 3-4 Column 1, which cites Nahum 2:11b, "Where the lion goes to enter, there also goes the whelp..." and provides the commentary,
" his refers to Demerius, king of Greece, who sought to enter Jerusalem through the counsel of the Flattery-Seekers; ut it never fell into thepower of the kings of Greece from Antiochus until the appearance of the rulers of the kittim
Kittim was a settlement in present-day Larnaca on the east coast of Cyprus, known in ancient times as Kition, or (in Latin) Citium. On this basis, the whole island became known as "Kittim" in Hebrew, including the Hebrew Bible. However the name se ...
...."
According to Larry R. Helyer (as well as to many other scholars), Demetrius in this text is
Demetrius III Eucaerus
Demetrius III Theos Philopator Soter Philometor Euergetes Callinicus ( grc, Δημήτριος θεός Φιλοπάτωρ σωτήρ Φιλομήτωρ Εὐεργέτης Καλλίνικος, surnamed Eucaerus; between 124 and 109 BCafter 8 ...
(95-88 BCE), the
Seleucid
The Seleucid Empire (; grc, Βασιλεία τῶν Σελευκιδῶν, ''Basileía tōn Seleukidōn'') was a Greek state in West Asia that existed during the Hellenistic period from 312 BC to 63 BC. The Seleucid Empire was founded by the ...
king who defeated
Alexander Jannaeus
Alexander Jannaeus ( grc-gre, Ἀλέξανδρος Ἰανναῖος ; he, ''Yannaʾy''; born Jonathan ) was the second king of the Hasmonean dynasty, who ruled over an expanding kingdom of Judea from 103 to 76 BCE. A son of John Hyrcanus, ...
in battle, but was forced to withdraw back to Syria. Accordingly, by "the Flattery-Seekers", the
Pharisees were probably meant.
The text refers to the biblical passages from Nahum 1:3-6; 2:12-14; 3:1-5, 6-9, 10-12, 14.
See also
*
The Seekers after Smooth Things
Bibliography
*
Allegro, John M., ''Qumran Cave 4, I (4Q158-4Q186)''
DJD V. (Oxford, 1968) ''editio princeps'', pp. 37–42.
* Berrin, Shani L., ''The Pesher Nahum Scroll from Qumran: An Exegetical Study of 4Q169''. (Leiden: Brill, 2004)
* Berrin, Shani L., "Pesher Nahum" in ''Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls'', eds Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C. VanderKam, Volume 2. (Oxford, 2000) , pp. 653–655.
* Doudna, Gregory, ''4Q Pesher Nahum: A Critical Edition''. (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002)
*
Charlesworth, James H., Henry W. L. Rietz, Casey D. Elledge, and Lidija Novakovic. ''Pesharim, Other Commentaries, and Related Documents.'' The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Texts with English Translations 6b. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002. (More recent publication of the Hebrew text and English translation on facing pages)
*
Cross, Frank Moore. ''The Ancient Library of Qumran.'' 3d ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. (General reading on the Dead Sea Scrolls in general, their discovery, and contents)
* Ingrassia, David,(2002)CLASS
Biblical Commentaries:Pesharim.Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible.
* http://www.preteristarchive.com/BibleStudies/DeadSeaScrolls/4Q169_pesher_nahum.html
References
External links
4Q169 at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library
{{Authority control
Dead Sea Scrolls