A critical edition of the four Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran (4Q208-4Q211) that comprise the Aramaic Astronomical Book, part of the Jewish pseudepigraphic literature of the Second Temple period. It describes the movement of the moon in its phases, schematic meteorology, and the movement of the stars in relation to the seasons of the year.
The Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most important discoveries for the history of Aramaic and for the background of early Judaism and Christianity. They constitute a “missing link” between Biblical Aramaic and the later Aramaic of the targums and midrashic literature. Among them are the oldest texts we have of the Book of Enoch and Tobit, as well as the earliest Aramaic translation of a portion of Scripture, the Targum of Job. Other previously unknown texts such as the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document have opened up many new avenues of research on the literature of early Judaism, and the dialect itself is chronologically the one nearest to the origins of Christianity. Now, for the first time, there is a comprehensive dictionary of all the Aramaic texts from the 11 Qumran caves, from a noted specialist in Qumran Aramaic. It is the first dictionary in any language devoted solely to this important Aramaic corpus and contains a wealth of detail, including definitions, extensive citations of the sources, discussions of difficult passages, revised readings, and a bibliography. It will be an indispensable resource to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the literature of early Judaism and Christianity, and the Aramaic language.
The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls represent roughly 13% of the Qumran library and correspond to a wide range of genres and topics. This book consists of the proceedings of a conference on the Aramaic scrolls from Qumran which took place in Aix-en-Provence in 2008. It includes both the papers themselves and a transcription of the discussions. The 22 papers tackle linguistic, exegetical and historical questions, focusing in particular on: the relation of the Aramaic texts to what we know as the Hebrew Bible; their literary genres; the question of their sectarian or non-sectarian provenance; the character of the corpus, and specifically its relevance to the development of apocalypticism and messianism in the Jewish tradition.
The fragments of Aramaic Levi Document are presented for the first time as a single coherent whole. This book, which will move the study of this pivotal document to a new level, includes original texts, translation, introduction and extensive and detailed commentary.
This book provides a new translation of substantial extracts from the Qumran writings, which comprise an important part of the Dead Sea scrolls. The writings reflect the beliefs and practices of a religious community which existed on the shores of the Dead Sea between the middle of the second century BC and AD 68. They shed considerable light on the Essenes, whose movement had an important focus at Qumran. In addition to selecting the most significant legislative, poetic and liturgical writings, Professor Knibb provides a commentary dealing with major interpretative problems raised by the extracts.
This volume of The Dead Sea Scrolls includes Pesharim and other related commentaries and documents. The Princeton Dead Sea Scrolls Project provides a major landmark in general access to these documents. It is the first serious attempt to provide accurate transcriptions and translations with critical commentary to all the nonbiblical scrolls found at Qumran. These are important reference books for specialized studies in biblical fields.
This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Qumran Aramaic. Not only Aramaic texts from Qumran caves, but also contemporary texts originating from other neighbouring locations in the Judaean Desert such as Nahal Hever, Murabba'at, Jericho, and Massada are covered. It would be an important tool of study for specialists in Aramaic linguistics, the Jewish culture of the Second Temple period, and the New Testament. The scope and nature of the grammar is comparable to that of Muraoka - Porten, A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (2nd revised ed., 2003).
Analysis of the scroll fragments of the Qumran Aramaic scrolls has been plentiful to date. Their shared characteristics of being written in Aramaic, the common language of the region, not focused on the Qumran Community, and dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE have enabled the creation of a shared identity, distinguishing them from other fragments found in the same place at the same time. This classification, however, could yet be too simplistic as here, for the first time, John Starr applies sophisticated statistical analyses to newly available electronic versions of these fragments. In so doing, Starr presents a potential new classification which comprises six different text types which bear distinctive textual features, and thus is able to narrow down the classification both temporally and geographically. Starr's re-visited classification presents fresh insights into the Aramaic texts at Qumran, with important implications for our understanding of the many strands that made up Judaism in the period leading to the writing of the New Testament.
The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras.
