Nash Papyrus

The Nash Papyrus is a set of four papyrus fragments acquired in Egypt in 1902 by William Leonard Nash, secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and now held by Cambridge University Library. Written in Hebrew, the fragments preserve a combined text of the Ten Commandments drawing on both the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions, followed by the opening of the Shema Yisrael prayer, and the wording departs in places from the later Masoretic Text while sometimes agreeing more closely with the Greek Septuagint. Early scholars dated the manuscript to around the second century AD, but later study placed it closer to 150 to 100 BC, which made it the oldest known Hebrew manuscript until the Dead Sea Scrolls came to light in 1947. Its likely liturgical use, possibly as a phylactery text, and its omission of the phrase house of bondage from the Ten Commandments, are among the details that have drawn scholarly attention to its probable origin among the Jewish community of Egypt. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/