Some Notes (Following Elisha Qimron's Paper, "the Biblical Lexicon in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls")

Abstract

In his significant paper, Elisha Qimron successfully elucidates features of form and aspects of meaning of number of biblical words and expressions. The importance of this paper lies, however, also in providing additional support to the conceptual definition that should be, to my mind, applied to Qumran Hebrew. As evidenced in the major non-biblical scrolls-the Classical Dead Sea texts-and many fragmentary works, stylistically, lexically and morphologically, Qumran Hebrew is not an imitation of biblical Hebrew, a biblicising jargon,' but virtually living and natural continuation of biblical Hebrew. For the writers of the Classical Qumran texts biblical Hebrew was not remote entity, vehicle of expression of penod of the past in the history of the nation, but the literary language of their time.2 Indeed, Qumran Hebrew (in the general sense of the term) was not pure biblical Hebrew. Having distinct features of its own, it is hard to define it by the terms commonly used to name the consecutive stages in the history of Hebrew. It was blend of biblical Hebrew with certain traits that naturally were possessed also by Mishnaic Hebrew