4 June 2019: Dead Sea Scrolls Meeting

The Opisthographs as a Scribal Cluster in the Dead Sea Scrolls

This paper investigates to which the degree the Qumran opisthographs can be seen as a distinct cluster of manuscripts within the collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. Though the opisthographs have not received much scholarly attention, they may provide a helpful point of departure to explore the scribal reality of the people behind the Scrolls.

The sources that will be discussed in this contribution are primarily 4Q415/4Q414, 4Q433a/4Q255, 4Q499/4Q497, 4Q503/4Q512, and 4Q509/4Q496/4Q506, but this corpus will be supplemented by other copies of the texts that we encounter on these scrolls. I will investigate the palaeography and codicology of these manuscripts, combined with textual analysis to examine the intertextual relations between these compositions and explore whether they share common themes and narrative structures.

This paper is intended as a case study to investigate scribal clusters on the basis of a combined material and textual approach and aims to increase our understanding of how individual scribes engaged with their texts and what that means for the way manuscripts in the collection are classified.

Philological Analysis and Interpretive Traditions: Divine Presence in the Dead Sea Scrolls 

My paper demonstrates how attention to the Dead Sea Scrolls on their own terms can disclose aspects of familiar texts which have otherwise been neglected and nuance familiar discourses. Whilst I focus on the scrolls and the biblical texts which they inherit, my reconceiving of the presence of God within and beyond the Temple has implications for ancient Judaism and early Christianity more broadly. Scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism and the New Testament often takes for granted that the relationship of the divine presence with the Temple is one of indwelling, or if not, assumes there to be no presence with the Temple at all. I show that ancient Judaism has a more diverse and nuanced picture of the location of God’s presence in relation to the Temple, one which relies on subtle prepositional rhetoric and narrative description. I focus on some Dead Sea Scrolls which describe God’s presence as over or upon the Temple: The Temple Scroll, 4QFlorilegium, and The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. This discourse of ‘on-dwelling’ presence inherits and transforms texts of the Hebrew Bible, including P, Ezekiel and Isaiah. Such ‘on-dwelling’ has implications for the conception of the deity in terms of visibility, pre-eminence and enthronement. Drawing on insights from metaphor theory, I explore how spatial conceptualisation evokes non-spatial concepts. At the same time, presence over and presence within are not mutually exclusive and these texts reveal subtle interplays between the two. Attention to ‘on-dwelling’ presence nuances our understanding of indwelling.

From Lexicography to Topic Models. Using Embedding Models to Discuss Local and Global Influence of the Psalms in the Hodayot

Throughout the years, multiple works on the influence of the Psalms in the Hodayot have been published (most notably Holm-Nielsen 1960, Hughes 2006, Elwolde 2012). Their shared insight is that, although the Hodayot use Psalm-like language, it is hard to pinpoint exactly the relevance of psalmodic passages, and the extent of their relevance. This is why terms such as ‘allusions’, ’implicit quotations’, and ‘parabiblical rewriting’ are often used to describe this textual relationship. In other words, we could say that the state of the art of traditional scholarship is in need of a fine-grained contextual model to discuss similarities between Biblical literature and the Hodayot.

Within deep learning research, multiple architectures exist to grasp the context of words. These models allow a fine-grained, quantitative comparison between bodies of text. These range from a small context window (‘often termed word embeddings’), to a large, document-level window (often known as ‘topic models’). This means they are able to grasp to what extent lexemes are used within from a global and local perspective. 

The presentation will propose to bridge these two fields of inquiry. It first describes how we can use these models to provide a semantic representation of the Biblical Psalms. Afterwards, we provide quantitative arguments to discuss its similarities with the Hodayot. These arguments are used to find global differences and similarities between the Biblical Psalms and the Hodayot, after which its most salient examples from a local context are discussed.

Pattern recognition techniques and deep neural networks in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls 

Most of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) collection have become digitally available only recently and techniques from the pattern recognition and artificial intelligence field can be applied to revise existing hypotheses on the writers and the dates of these scrolls. The inceptive analysis of the DSS includes several challenges in pre-processing, binarizing, character restoring and segmenting. Different techniques from computer vision are studied in addressing these challenges. Additionally, the use of deep neural networks proves to be successful in some of these aspects. After the initial pre-processing, experiments are performed in identifying the writers and script style using several dedicated features and machine learning techniques. Finally, a discussion is made on whether to use pattern recognition techniques or to use the deep learning methods on this relatively limited ancient manuscript collection which is degraded over the course of time and scarcely labelled.

Copyists, Correctors, Contaminators: The Consistency and Inconsistency of Dead Sea Scribes

Orthography and morphology is a window into the workshop of the Dead Sea scribes. In this conversation, we will explore the scribal behaviour of five different scribes in relation to their orthography and morphology. The Scribe of 1QS, the scribe of the Isaiah scroll, the scribe of the Hodayot, the scribe of 1QpHab and the Temple Scroll, and finally our first GAI scribe (Groningen Artificial Intelligence scribe). The relationship between the scribe, the spelling practice and the manuscripts will be the focus of the conversation. Possible questions include, where are they consistent? Where are they inconsistent? What does the consistency and inconsistency mean? How have the different scholars in the field approached these previous questions? Possible options include, a Qumran Scribal Practice. An anti-language. A voice of authority. Vorlage. A dance between the spoken and the written. A year ago, I could barely imagine anything more boring than orthography and morphology, but I was wrong. It is so interesting.

Singular or Plural: A Re-evaluation of the Linguistic Evidence for the Reconstruction of Qumran Scribal Practice(s)

Emanuel Tov proposes eighteen linguistic features that can serve as indicators of a Qumran scribal practice in the Dead Sea scrolls. This paper critically evaluates Tov’s hypothesis by extracting and analysing the frequencies for these linguistic features. More specifically, a dimensionality reduction technique called ‘correspondence regression’ is used to visualise how many ‘traditions’ are present within the scrolls. Although it is almost impossible to identify clusters based on the frequency table only, advanced visualisation techniques suggest that a) there is indeed a contrast between MT-like and non-MT-like scrolls, b) there are multiple documents that stand ‘in-between’ these two extremes, and c) that both within the MT-like and the non-MT-like there is considerable variation, with especially in the non-MT-like group scrolls that cluster in meaningful groups. The fact that there is a non-MT-like group is not surprising given the binary features that Tov defined. Yet even on this basis of binary features, the data does not fit the hypothesis of one single practice.

The 11Q5 Psalter as a Scribal Product

In this paper I investigate the nexus between textual development, editorial processes, and physical manuscript production through the example of the 11Q5 psalter. I propose that the 11Q5 psalter is best understood as the result of editorial planning and execution that was guided and partially determined by pragmatic concerns for manuscript production. Source texts, advance editorial planning, and the production of the first complete draft copy of the 11Q5 psalter each in their own way impacted the final product, such that the 11Q5 psalter cannot be understood without accounting for each dynamic. I suggest that the compiler operated with several default modes, some of which were conditioned specifically by the material processes of text production. These defaults include an aim for an efficient workflow, preservation of source material, linear progression through both the primary exemplar and the first complete written draft document, the use of a minimal number of exemplars with a limited field of view, and the conception of the Davidic psalter as an open book, an anthology subject to further supplementation and rearrangement. With regard to the creative contributions of the compiler, the entire production of the well-preserved parts of the 11Q5 psalter can be accounted for on the supposition of two expansions of psalms, five insertions of supplementary material, eight or nine movements of psalms, and a corrective appendix. My explanation of the process of the creation of the 11Q5 psalter challenges the current near consensus that it is a distinct literary work to be analyzed on its own terms as an abstract literary entity. I suggest rather that the 11Q5 psalter was created as a revised version of the Davidic psalter, expanded and rearranged from an MT-like base text to enhance thematic, lexical, and sometimes formal connections between psalms.

4QEna and the Structure of the Enochic Preamble in 1 Enoch 1:2-3a 

The Enochic superscription and preamble in 1 Enoch 1:1-3a both contribute to the framing of the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36). This introductory unit reworks, imitates and transforms a series of intertexts including Numbers 24:15-17, Deuteronomy 33:1 and Genesis 6:9 in order to establish and legitimize the authority of the Enochic oracle in 1:3b-5:9 and the narratives associated with Enoch in chapters 6-36.

This paper will argue that the preamble located in 1:2-3a is structured in a concentric or chiastic pattern. It proposes that the reading and transformation of a series of intertexts is embedded and tiered within this structure. This chiastic structure shifts the voice from third to first person discourse and consequently also marks the transition from Enoch as recipient to agent in the revelatory process. This paper will argue that the reworking of these intertexts and the preamble’s interpretation of chapters 6-36 is embedded within this concentric or chiastic structure. 

In this paper I will examine whether this structure can be observed within the limited evidence provided in the Aramaic of 4QEn a , or whether the identification is only able to be observed in the preamble as formulated within the Greek of Codex Panopolitanus and the Ethiopic corpus. I will argue that some elements of this structure are only clearly discernible within 4QEn a . This paper is part of a broader project examining the form and function of intertexts in 1 Enoch 1-5 and the relationship between the Aramaic, Greek and Ethiopic versions of this literary unit.

The Dead Sea Scrolls as Reflecting a Textual Community. What Does It Reflect Indeed? 

A relatively recent notion in Dead Sea Scrolls research is the approach of the people behind the scrolls as belonging to a textual community. The concept of ‘textual communities’ is mostly drawn from Brian Stock’s analysis of medieval communities, and it has been applied to Qumran studies by Mladen Popović, Charlotte Hempel, and Judith Newman. The heuristic use of this concept is primarily to prevent the anachronistic notions of the Qumran community and to account for the importance of texts at Qumran. However, Popović mainly treats the collection as a whole, whereas Hempel and Newman focus on the Community Rule and the Hodayot, respectively, as a central in the life and thought of (one of) the Qumran community/ies. In this paper, I assess the main characteristics of Stock's original concepts and the emphases in Qumran scholarship. The central question is: What distinguishes a textual community distinct from a general community?

‘Tell Me Your Dream so I May Understand’: Dream as Interpretation in the Genesis Apocryphon 

The techniques involved in dream interpretation have long been seen to provide useful context for early methods of interpretation. The phenomenon of dreams being used to interpret or perform exegesis on earlier texts or tradition has been less explored. The Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20) offers a fertile example in which dreams are repeatedly built into or around the biblical narratives. These dreams attribute knowledge to their recipients, Noah and Abraham, but also provide the readers with a deeper or a different understanding of the events and characters surrounding the dream. Eshel’s work in contextualising dream imagery and Perrin’s in showing the use of dreams, here and in other Aramaic Qumran texts, for presenting the recipients as prophets are valuable. Nonetheless an exploration of the dreams themselves as a tool for interpretation within the text is fruitful.

In order to fully explore the use of dream here I want to compare it with the dreams in two other texts which explore or expand biblical narratives: Ezekiel’s Exagoge and The Ladder of Jacob. In the first, a dream is inserted, and in the second, it is expanded and reinterpreted, however, both provide useful contrast demonstrating the nuance of the way the dreams are employed in the Genesis Apocryphon. I intend to show that the Genesis Apocryphon includes dream not only as one revelatory model among others, though this is certainly important, but it also includes dream as a tool whose symbolic mode does not conceal but illuminates the narratives it depicts and expands.

Isaiah’s Poetics of Exile and Wilderness: The Afterlife of Isaiah 40:1-11

This paper will explore how 1QS’s interpretation of Isaiah 40:3 builds upon the connection between divine speech and the transformation of the desert motif as it also operates within Second Isaiah. It has been noted that wilderness imagery in scrolls such as 4QpPs, 4QpIsa and the Hodayot can function as a metaphor for oppression, exile, and also of divine encounter and purification. These tensions that the wilderness connotes are also held in Second Isaiah, and arguably the interpretation of Isaiah 40:3 found in 1QS reinforces how these tensions are an invaluable part of both Second Isaiah’s poetics of exile as well as some of the scrolls. To demonstrate this, I will analyse how 1QS’s interpretation of Isaiah 40:3 acts as a kind of commentary upon 40:1-11 by building upon conceptual metaphors present throughout Second Isaiah, such as ‘Life is a Journey’. As the phrase “study of the Law”  in 1QS 8:15 interprets the quotation of 40:3, “clear the way of the **** […]”, I want to explore whether 1QS’s interpretation reflects the way in which the proclamation in 40:3-4 is commented upon by the rebutting voice in 40:6-8 by connecting the preparation of God’s path in the desert with the study of the law. Rather than focusing on how 1QS’s interpretation of 40:3 possibly justified a literal move to the desert, this example also demonstrates how wilderness imagery functioned as part of a metaphorical discourse concerning exile among Second Temple texts and biblical literature more broadly.

An Understanding of the hapax legomena of the Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls 

Research into the hapax legomena of the Hebrew Bible has focused primarily on how these words might be understood in the light of ancient Near Eastern cognates. For example, Abraham Yahuda (1903) considered hapaxes in the light of Arabic, and Chaim Cohen (1978) later studied biblical hapaxes in relation to Akkadian and Ugaritic. However, not only does the use of cognate languages in the study of aspects of Biblical Hebrew pose problems (See Barr’s Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament), the study of hapax legomena as a phenomenon also has its issues. 

However, the way in which biblical hapaxes have been understood throughout the history of interpretation continues to be a fruitful field of research. Study in this field provides great insight into how difficult words have been dealt with throughout the ages. Indeed, Frederick Greenspahn—in his seminal work ‘Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew’—considers the interpretation of hapaxes in the ancient versions, rabbinic literature, and in the Middle Ages and contemporary scholarship. However, he does not particularly consider the role that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls may have on this field. Biblical texts, written in a form Hebrew only a matter of centuries after the texts themselves were composed, will naturally be of significant interest for the study of difficult Hebrew forms. This paper therefore intends to fill this gap in the field by considering the role the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has had on the study of the biblical hapax legomena, with particular reference to select examples from the biblical Scrolls.