מקומראן לשכם בנתיבים נעלמים

Several peculiar, mainly Aramaic lexemes and collocations occurring in the Dead Sea Scrolls reappear in much later documents, such as Hebrew liturgical pieces composed during the late Byzantine period. The tannaitic and amoraic periods are silent in this respect, with no attestation to their existence. Surprisingly, they become frequent in Samaritan literature, especially in liturgical compositions that evolved in Neo-Samaritan Hebrew, the hybrid Aramaizing literary Hebrew characteristic of the fourteenth century. Lack of written material does not permit us to follow the path of their transmission. However, their parallel diffusion in separate (and separatist) communities is striking. Thus שמח, denoting 'joy', which occurs in the Aramaic Testament of Qahat (4Q542), substantiated by the verb ישמחון in 4Q204 (Enochc), reappears in the Jewish Byzantine liturgy, and in fourteenth-century Neo-Samaritan Hebrew. Similarly, the collocation שלום ושדך, which occurs in Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q386), appears in a Jewish liturgical piece composed in Aramaic, and is quite frequent in Neo-Samaritan Hebrew. To the same category belongs מאום, the Temple Scroll's version of מאומה in Deut. 13:18. The notion of 'thing' is systematically represented by כלום in postbiblical literature, מאומה and מאום being largely abandoned. Although the Samaritan Pentateuch has מאומה like the Masoretic text, in Neo-Samaritan Hebrew מאום is restored. Finally, a tiny fragment, namely 1Q42 (an unclassified fragment), exhibits a unique word רעבות, which apparently constitutes a lexical variant of the habitual רעבון. The same word occurs in a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch (Gen. 42:19).