ספר דקדוק חדש של העברית מקומראן: Elisha Qimron, A Grammar of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jerusalem 2018

Ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one line of inquiry into these unique historical sources has been linguistic. While trying to accurately describe the “new” Hebrew dialect, scholars have disagreed on the exact nature of Qumran Hebrew and its relationship to the language of the Bible and tannaitic writings. In his Grammar of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Elisha Qimron – the eminent scholar of that language variety – presents his view of the language of the scrolls along with the most detailed description (yet) of its orthographic practices, phonology and morphology, as well as selected topics in syntax. Qimron essentially accords Qumran Hebrew the status of primus inter pares. Primus, because of the antiquity of the source texts (which unlike other attestations of Hebrew were not mediated by a chain of scribes for almost one millennium) and the size of the corpus. And inter pares, because Qimron readily acknowledges the importance of the linguistic information contained in the other traditions of Hebrew, to which he constantly refers for comparison. The volume brims with innovative philological discussions of Qumran Hebrew (and Biblical Hebrew) forms, and will serve both Hebraists and scholars who study the scrolls from a literary angle. The grammar provides an important counterpoint to Qimron’s three-volume edition of the Scrolls.