העברית במגילות מדבר יהודה ומחקר לשון חכמים

The article examines the connections between Qumran Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, one of the dialects spoken in Erets Yisrael in the era when the scrolls were written. The scrolls contain many words and expressions known from Mishnaic Hebrew. Although Qumran and Mishnaic Hebrew share dozens of words and expressions, a comprehensive examination of the scrolls shows that words from Mishnaic Hebrew usually appear there only once, or a small number of times. Only several of the grammatical categories characteristic of Mishnaic Hebrew occur frequently in the scrolls; for example, the first person plural pronoun is more frequent than the biblical. Other categories, such as the verbal noun (gerund) of the qal and nif'al patterns and the verbal noun of pi`el and nitpa`el are very frequent at Qumran, but most of these nouns were already used in Biblical Hebrew. However, some nouns known for centuries from Mishnaic Hebrew alone were discovered in Qumran documents. The discovery of words and grammatical forms known only from Mishnaic Hebrew in the scrolls is important because it indicates their authenticity in Mishnaic Hebrew when it was a spoken language. For example, the discovery of the form גדפן in the פעלן pattern in the scrolls indicates that this pattern existed in Erets Yisrael and was not a literary byproduct of Babylonian Mishnaic Hebrew, as was formerly thought. And it is not just the authenticity, but also the antiquity of the phenomena that is important to the history of the language. If a form known from the Mishnah (which was edited in the late second or early third century) is found in one of the Qumran scrolls (which were written as early as the Second Temple period ± the first or the second centuries B.C.E. to the first century C.E.), we can then conclude that this form existed in the language for centuries prior to the Mishnah. One example of this phenomenon is the verb העשה the hif`il of the verb עשה , which was hitherto known only from Mishnaic Hebrew. Its discovery in a Qumran scroll shows its existence in the language centuries prior to the tannaitic period. The Qumran material also teaches us about the dialects of vernacular Hebrew, of which Mishnaic Hebrew is a representative, during the period of the scrolls. In the manuscripts of the Mishnah we find both נתאלמנה and נתארמלה . If previously scholars thought that the form נתארמלה was a late borrowing from an Aramaic root, which occurred in Babylon when Mishnaic Hebrew was no longer a living language, the discovery of the verb התארמלה in one of the Qumran scrolls shows that one of the Hebrew dialects borrowed this verb from Aramaic as early as the Second Temple period. It should be stressed that phenomena previously designated as Babylonian are already reflected in the scrolls and in the Bar-Kosiba Letters. It may be argued that there is a dialectical connection between the features of Babylonian Mishnaic Hebrew and those of Mishnaic Hebrew as reflected in the scrolls. In brief, the article summarizes the research that has been conducted so far regarding the links between the language of the scrolls and the language of the Mishnah, and also marks a path to a comprehensive study of this issue. One can only hope that it will be thoroughly researched in the future.