P.Oxy. L 3522: Job 42 and the Divine Name
A first-century papyrus-roll fragment from Oxyrhynchus preserves Job 42:11-12 in Greek while writing the divine name twice in archaizing Hebrew letters inside the Greek line.
- Artifact date
- First century AD
- Findspot
- Oxyrhynchus, Egypt
- Current location
- Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, Oxford
What archaeologists can actually examine
P.Oxy. L 3522, Rahlfs 857, is a small first-century papyrus-roll fragment from Oxyrhynchus now in Oxford's Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library. It preserves portions of Greek Job 42:11-12, where Job's relatives and acquaintances return and the Lord blesses his latter condition. At two points the scribe wrote the divine name in paleo-Hebrew characters rather than translating it with Greek kyrios. The fragment is direct evidence for one Jewish Greek-scriptural copying practice near the turn of the era. Its two verses cannot establish the wording or divine-name practice of Greek Job as a whole.
A first-century Greek Job roll
Oxford identifies the artifact as a papyrus roll preserving Job 42:11-12 and dates it paleographically to the first century.
The name changes script
The principal scribe inserted the divine name twice in archaizing Hebrew letters within otherwise Greek lines.
The letter forms show limits
Irregular Hebrew shapes suggest preservation of a revered written convention without proving the copyist knew Hebrew.
A tiny but unusually informative witness
Two verses contribute little continuous text but reveal format, scribal practice, and early circulation of Greek Job.
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
Grenfell and Hunt's Egypt Exploration Fund excavations recovered vast quantities of papyri at Oxyrhynchus between 1896 and 1907, but this particular fragment was not published until P. J. Parsons edited it in volume 50 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1983. Oxford now catalogs it under inventory 34 4B.72/J(1)a and provides digital images under in-copyright terms. The long interval between excavation, sorting, identification, and edition is typical of the Oxyrhynchus collection. No household, synagogue, or rubbish context securely identifies its owner, so the manuscript's Jewish character is inferred from date, roll format, and scribal treatment rather than from an associated personal archive.
What you are looking at
The surviving papyrus is only a portion of a roll column, written in an informal upright Greek book hand with roughly nineteen to twenty-two letters per line. Spacing and enlarged letters help divide sense units. Most striking are two insertions of the four-letter divine name in archaizing Hebrew script, written within the Greek text by the principal scribe rather than by a clearly separate specialist. The Hebrew letter forms are imperfect and may indicate copying a visual convention without full command of the script. The fragmentary second-column traces make the original column height uncertain, so reconstructions of the full roll's dimensions remain estimates rather than observed measurements.
Where it belongs in history
Paleographic comparison places the hand in the early first century AD, although handwriting can normally yield only a range. That date and the use of a roll precede the widespread Christian preference for the codex and make a Jewish production context highly probable, not absolutely documented. The Greek book of Job has a complex textual history: its oldest form was substantially shorter than the Hebrew text, and later Greek transmission added material under asterisked or other editorial signs. P.Oxy. 3522 samples only the closing restoration scene, yet its divine-name convention belongs to broader Second Temple and early Roman-period debates about how Hebrew sacred names were represented in Greek manuscripts.
Consensus, questions, and debate
The identification of the passage, first-century paleographic date, roll format, and paleo-Hebrew divine name are accepted features of the edition. Scholars debate what such mixed-script writing reveals. It may preserve a Jewish reverential convention inherited from earlier Greek scrolls, but the malformed Hebrew letters suggest that this copyist did not necessarily understand Hebrew. Discussion also concerns direction: the name was integrated into a left-to-right Greek writing sequence even though Hebrew normally runs right-to-left. The fragment should therefore be compared with other Greek Jewish-scriptural witnesses rather than used to claim that every original Septuagint book once displayed the tetragrammaton in precisely the same way.
The biblical record beside the artifact
The artifact directly transmits Job 42:11-12. It preserves the scene in which Job's family and former acquaintances console him and give gifts, followed by the statement that the Lord blessed Job's later life. The paleo-Hebrew divine name occurs where the Greek sentence refers to the Lord, making the physical manuscript relevant to how ancient readers encountered the name behind modern translations. This is textual evidence for the antiquity and circulation of Greek Job, not archaeological confirmation that Job, his livestock, or the gathering can be independently located in history. The manuscript's testimony is to reception and copying.
Job 42:11–12
11Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.
12So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.
A responsible historical conclusion
P.Oxy. 3522 makes a scribal decision visible at the scale of a few letters. The copyist did not treat the divine name as an ordinary Greek word; he interrupted one script with another and gave the sacred name a distinct visual identity. That choice offers rare evidence for how an ancient Greek-speaking Jewish reader might recognize holiness on the page. The fragment also places Job's final restoration in circulation centuries before the major Christian parchment codices. Its value lies less in the quantity of text preserved than in the conjunction of date, format, Greek wording, and a materially distinctive treatment of God's name.
Authoritative sources
Institutional catalogs, excavation reports, and academic publications let you examine the evidence beyond this summary.
P.Oxy. L 3522: LXX Job 42:11-12
Oxford Papyrology, University of OxfordGives the exact inventory, passage, provenance, first-century date, roll format, editor, location, digital images, and rights status.
Format Features in Early Papyri: P.Oxy. 3522
University of PennsylvaniaSummarizes the edition's column, hand, punctuation, roll format, paleo-Hebrew name, and cautions about the copyist's Hebrew competence.
Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 41
International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies / University of PennsylvaniaPlaces P.Oxy. 3522 within scholarly analysis of Greek-scriptural manuscripts that preserve the tetragrammaton in Hebrew script.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Collection
University of Oxford / Egypt Exploration SocietyDocuments the excavations, institutional ownership, collection scale, publication program, and provenance context for Oxyrhynchus papyri.