The Nash Papyrus: The Oldest Copy of the Ten Commandments
Long before the Dead Sea Scrolls emerged from the caves near Qumran, one small bundle of Hebrew papyrus fragments held a remarkable title: the oldest known manuscript of any portion of the Hebrew Bible. The Nash Papyrus, acquired in Egypt in 1902 and now housed at Cambridge University Library, preserves the Ten Commandments followed by the opening words of the Shema. For nearly half a century it stood alone as a window into how Scripture was copied, prayed, and treasured in the centuries before Christ.
What the Nash Papyrus Actually Contains
The manuscript consists of four fragments of papyrus, joined together to form 24 lines of Hebrew text. The content falls into two parts. First comes a version of the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue. Notably, this is not a straight copy of either biblical passage where the commandments appear. Instead, it is a blend of the Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 versions, weaving elements of both traditions together. Following the commandments, the text moves directly into the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–5), the great confession of Israel's faith: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one."
This combination is significant. The pairing of the Decalogue with the Shema was a well-attested devotional and liturgical practice in Second Temple Judaism. In other words, the Nash Papyrus almost certainly was not a page torn from a full Torah scroll. It appears instead to be a liturgical or devotional text, used for prayer, teaching, or recitation, and it may be physical evidence of the custom of reciting the commandments alongside the Shema.
How Old Is It?
Dating ancient manuscripts is rarely simple, and the Nash Papyrus illustrates why hedging matters. When Stanley A. Cook first published the fragments in 1903, he assigned them to the 2nd century AD. Over the following decades, scholars re-examined the handwriting against other dated documents, and those reappraisals pushed the date dramatically earlier. Today the papyrus is commonly dated to roughly the 2nd century BC, with many specialists placing it around 150 to 100 BC and some allowing a wider 2nd-to-1st century BC window.
It is worth being candid here: dates for undated manuscripts rest largely on paleography, the study of handwriting styles, which yields estimates rather than certainties. The provenance adds to the uncertainty. The papyrus was reportedly acquired in Egypt, said to come from the Fayyum region, but its exact findspot was never documented. What scholars can say with confidence is that before 1947 it was, by a wide margin, the oldest Hebrew biblical manuscript known to exist.
Why It Mattered Before the Dead Sea Scrolls
To appreciate the Nash Papyrus, remember the state of the evidence a century ago. Until the mid-20th century, the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles available, such as the Aleppo and Leningrad Codices, dated to around the 10th and 11th centuries AD. The gap between the Hebrew Scriptures and the earliest surviving copies was enormous, and the Nash Papyrus leapt across a thousand years of it. As the oldest known copy of any portion of the Bible in Hebrew, it gave researchers their earliest direct look at the biblical text.
That changed in 1947 with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which pushed the evidence back further and supplied far more material. But the Nash Papyrus retains an honored place. When the first scrolls surfaced, scholars compared their script to the Nash Papyrus to help establish that the new finds were genuinely ancient. The fragment that had once stood alone became a yardstick for authenticating an entire library.
The Septuagint Connection
One of the most intriguing features of the Nash Papyrus is that its text sometimes agrees with the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than with the later standardized Masoretic Text. The papyrus follows an ordering of certain commandments that matches the Greek tradition, and it includes a short introductory line paralleled in the Septuagint. This does not mean the Hebrew Bible was unstable. Rather, it shows that in the Second Temple period more than one textual tradition circulated side by side, and that the Greek translators were often working from Hebrew texts closely related to what we see here.
For anyone interested in the reliability of Scripture, this is exactly the kind of detail worth understanding rather than fearing. The variations are minor and well within the range textual scholars expect from hand-copied documents. If anything, the Nash Papyrus shows how carefully the essential content, the commandments and the confession of one God, was transmitted across languages and centuries. You can explore further background on the Nash Papyrus and see how it fits alongside other early witnesses in our Translations hub.
The Nash Papyrus is easy to overlook. It is fragmentary, faded, and no larger than a page. Yet it carries outsized significance for the history of the biblical text. It preserves two of the most foundational passages in all of Scripture, shows us how ancient Jews worshiped, and once served as humanity's oldest tangible link to the Hebrew Bible. For students of Scripture and its transmission, it remains a treasure worth knowing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Nash Papyrus older than the Dead Sea Scrolls?
No. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered beginning in 1947, include manuscripts as old as, or older than, the Nash Papyrus. But before that discovery, the Nash Papyrus was the oldest known Hebrew manuscript of any part of the Bible, commonly dated to around the 2nd century BC.
What exactly does the Nash Papyrus contain?
A version of the Ten Commandments that blends the Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 accounts, immediately followed by the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4–5. It is a liturgical or devotional text rather than a page from a full Torah scroll.
Where is the Nash Papyrus today?
It is held at Cambridge University Library in England, catalogued as MS Or.233. It was presented to the library in 1903 by W. L. Nash, after whom it is named, and has since been digitized for public viewing.
Does the Nash Papyrus undermine the reliability of the Bible?
Not at all. Its occasional agreement with the Septuagint simply reflects that multiple closely related textual traditions circulated in antiquity. The core content, the commandments and the declaration of one God, is transmitted faithfully.