Pesher Nahum (designated 4Q169) was discovered in 1952 among the manuscripts recovered from Cave 4 at Qumran, on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. The cave yielded tens of thousands of fragments representing hundreds of documents; 4Q169 was identified and reconstructed from several poorly preserved pieces. John Marco Allegro led early work on the Cave 4 materials in the mid-1950s, and the official critical edition was later produced by John Strugnell and Allegro for the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series (DJD V, 1968). The fragments are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The scroll is written in a Hebrew Herodian script dateable paleographically to roughly the late first century BC. It preserves a running sectarian commentary (pesher) on select verses from the book of Nahum, proceeding lemma by lemma. Most notably, columns 3–4 reference a figure called the "Lion of Wrath" who "hangs men alive"—widely interpreted by scholars as an allusion to the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BC), who according to Josephus crucified eight hundred Pharisees. The scroll also mentions "Demetrius king of Greece" (plausibly Demetrius III Eucaerus, who intervened in Judea c. 88 BC) and "Antiochus," providing the only explicit naming of known historical persons in the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus. The historical and exegetical significance of 4Q169 is substantial. It demonstrates that the Qumran community read biblical prophecy as directly encoding recent and contemporary events, a hermeneutical method with close parallels to interpretive strategies visible in the New Testament. The reference to crucifixion as a punishment confirms the practice's presence in Judean consciousness well before the Roman period, contextualizing New Testament crucifixion accounts within an established cultural-legal memory. The scroll anchors pesher genre interpretation to verifiable Hasmonean chronology, making it a key document for reconstructing late Second Temple exegetical practice. **Sources:** John M. Allegro and A. A. Anderson, *Qumrân Cave 4: I (4Q158–4Q186)*, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert V (Clarendon Press, 1968); Maurya Horgan, *Pesharim: Qumran Interpretations of Biblical Books* (Catholic Biblical Association, 1979); Geza Vermes, *The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English* (Penguin, 1997); Nahum 2:11–13; Nahum 3:1–7.
Pesher Nahum is the only Dead Sea Scroll to name identifiable historical figures—Antiochus, Demetrius, and a cryptic reference to crucifixion—anchoring sectarian biblical exegesis directly to datable Hasmonean-era events and illuminating first-century interpretive methods.