העדפת צורות מוארכות במגילות מדבר יהודה

Since the publication of the first Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls more than five decades ago, their language has remained the subject of debate. Is it a continuation of late biblical Hebrew? Does it represent the attempt to write classical biblical Hebrew with inadvertent slips of a spoken vernacular akin to tannaitic Hebrew? Or does the language reflect a spoken dialect of Hebrew that is significantly different from those already known? The article discusses what appears to be a general phenomenon in the Hebrew manuscripts from Qumran that may bear on the debate as to the nature of the language, namely, the preference for lengthening and lengthened forms. It is argued that the longer forms found in different grammatical categories are part of a general linguistic pattern. One finds morphological lengthening with final -āh in pronouns (independent, possessive, and objective), verbs (first person imperfect and imperative), and adverbs. The preference for lengthened forms also manifests itself in the extreme plene orthography of the scribes and possibly in the preservation (or creation of full vowels) in the contextual forms