P.Oxy. VII 1007: Genesis and the Double-Yod Divine Name
A third-century parchment codex leaf from Oxyrhynchus preserves portions of Genesis 2-3 in Greek and marks the divine name with an unusual crossed double-yod sign.
- Artifact date
- Third century AD
- Findspot
- Oxyrhynchus, Egypt
- Current location
- British Library, Papyrus 2047
What archaeologists can actually examine
P.Oxy. VII 1007, Rahlfs 907 and British Library Papyrus 2047, is a third-century parchment leaf from a Greek Genesis codex. Its two-column text preserves parts of Genesis 2:7-9, 16-19, 23-25 and 3:1-8, covering the formation of the man, Eden's trees and command, the creation of the woman, and the serpent episode. Where the divine name occurs, the scribe uses a distinctive pair of Hebrew yod-like characters crossed by a horizontal stroke; elsewhere theos appears as a contracted sacred name. The leaf directly documents Greek transmission and mixed scribal conventions, not Eden's historicity.
Eden survives on a single leaf
The two-column parchment preserves several portions of Genesis 2:7-3:8 in Greek despite substantial edge loss.
A crossed double-yod marks the name
The divine name is represented by two Hebrew-derived signs under a horizontal stroke within the Greek text.
Material signals do not identify the community
Codex format and sacred-name conventions combine in ways compatible with more than one Jewish-Christian production scenario.
The witness is catalogically stable
British Library Papyrus 2047 and Göttingen Rahlfs 907 identify the same physical manuscript for comparative textual study.
Follow the evidence from discovery to debate
Move through the find in a deliberate order: establish its provenance, examine the surviving object, place it in time, and then weigh the scholarly interpretation.
How the find came to light
The Egypt Exploration Fund excavations at Oxyrhynchus recovered the leaf, and Grenfell and Hunt published it in volume VII of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1910. It later entered the British Museum and is now cataloged by the British Library as Papyrus 2047. As with much material from the site, the broad provenance is secure while a fine-grained archaeological context or original owner is not. The single surviving leaf attracted attention because parchment was less common than papyrus in early Oxyrhynchus biblical finds and because its divine-name sign complicated simple classifications of manuscripts as either Jewish or Christian.
What you are looking at
The artifact is a damaged parchment codex leaf written on both sides in two columns. The surviving text is discontinuous because edges and inner portions are lost, yet enough remains to identify several closely spaced Genesis scenes. Its most discussed feature is the divine-name abbreviation: two yod-like signs under a shared horizontal line occupy space within the Greek text. The same scribe also contracts the Greek word for God, while common Christian contractions are not consistently applied to other eligible words. These material choices, together with codex format and parchment, form the evidence; none alone functions as a reliable label for the copyist's religious identity.
Where it belongs in history
Paleography places P.Oxy. 1007 in the third century AD, though no colophon supplies an exact year. By then Greek Genesis had circulated for centuries among Jewish readers and was increasingly copied and interpreted by Christians. The codex format became especially common in Christian book culture, but Jewish use of codices is not impossible; likewise, a Hebrew-derived divine-name sign can be copied within a Christian manuscript. The leaf therefore belongs to a period of overlapping textual habits rather than a clean boundary between communities. Göttingen's Septuagint catalogue registers it as Rahlfs 907, enabling its readings to be compared systematically with other Greek Genesis witnesses.
Consensus, questions, and debate
Scholars agree on the identification, broad date, parchment codex format, and unusual divine-name sign. Debate centers on whether the combined evidence points to Jewish production, Christian production, or a transitional scribal environment. Earlier typologies sometimes treated Hebrew forms of the name as decisively Jewish and codex plus nomina sacra as decisively Christian; P.Oxy. 1007 resists that binary. The crossed double yod has analogies in Jewish substitutions for the tetragrammaton, but the copyist's intention and reading practice remain unknown. Textual variants must also be assessed passage by passage rather than assigning the entire witness to a simple textual family.
The biblical record beside the artifact
The leaf is physically connected to Genesis 2:7-3:8, not merely thematically related. It preserves Greek wording from the formation of humanity, the garden command, the recognition of woman as corresponding to man, the couple's nakedness, and the serpent's challenge. Its double-yod sign marks the divine name in passages modern English Bibles conventionally render LORD God. For Bible study, it demonstrates that these chapters were being copied, read, and materially marked in Roman Egypt. It cannot decide the literary sources behind Genesis 2-3, reconstruct a complete early text from one leaf, or independently verify the garden narrative.
Genesis 2:7–9
7And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
8¶ And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
9And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 3:1–8
1Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3But of the fruit of the tree which [is] in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6And when the woman saw that the tree [was] good for food, and that it [was] pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make [one] wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
7And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they [were] naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
8And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
A responsible historical conclusion
A single leaf captures the complexity of ancient biblical transmission. Its reader encountered Genesis in Greek, in a codex rather than a scroll, on parchment rather than papyrus, and with God's name visually differentiated by a sign drawn from Hebrew tradition. Those features reveal how material form and reverence interacted without identifying the community with certainty. Because the surviving verses include the garden command and serpent dialogue, the object connects familiar theology with a real ancient page. It matters most as evidence that scriptural boundaries, book technologies, and sacred-name conventions could overlap in ways modern labels tend to oversimplify.
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
Papyrus 2047
British Library Archives and Manuscripts CatalogueDocuments the exact shelfmark, Genesis contents, parchment format, Oxyrhynchus provenance, date, physical description, and bibliography.
Rahlfs 907
Göttingen Academy Septuagint ProjectProvides the standard Septuagint identifier, contents, dimensions, holding institution, date, editions, and scholarly bibliography.
Format Features in Early Papyri: P.Oxy. 1007
University of PennsylvaniaAnalyzes the leaf's format, double-yod tetragram substitute, contracted theos, other uncontracted words, and Jewish-Christian classification problem.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part VII
Egypt Exploration Fund / Internet ArchiveOriginal scholarly publication of P.Oxy. 1007 with transcription, description, paleographic observations, and plate.