Manifestations

Research on the Dead Sea Scrolls has moved into a second phase. Over half a century from their discovery in 1947, the texts have been edited and translated, and scholars are now learning to adjust their views to the new data. The impact of the Scrolls has been enormous, in research on the Bible, ancient Judaism, and early Christianity. The second phase, less spectacular but equally important, consists of re-editing and re-interpreting the Scrolls in light of the present state of the art. Linguists too stand before the task of elaborating in more systematic fashion what is known generally, and approximately, about the language of these “new” texts.

The discovery of the Qumran texts has entailed a demotion of Tiberian Hebrew: from being the universal norm, it has become merely one of several equally authentic forms of Hebrew. The forceful confrontation with a sizable group of very old texts, written in a form of Hebrew that was definitely not Tiberian, has led Hebraists to recognize the existence of linguistic diversity in Ancient Hebrew. Typologically, the differences between Tiberian Hebrew and Qumran Hebrew are similar to those between, say, Babylonian Hebrew and Samaritan Hebrew. At least some of these differences likely go back to dialectal diversity, such as would characterize a living language. When this is acknowledged, as it has been gradually by most cognoscenti, the way is cleared for an approach to Qumran Hebrew that does not try to press the data into Tiberian molds, but recognizes its original features for what they are.

The International Symposia on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira have been instrumental in turning Qumran Hebrew and its close cognates into a rightful object of study. The present edition, the seventh, intends to continue the level of excellence characterizing the earlier symposia. The ultimate objective, as always, is to contribute to a better understanding of Hebrew, and of the texts written in that language.