Evidence for Hebrew phonology from the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (original) (raw)
2019, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting
Increasingly it is being recognized that the pronunciation of Hebrew represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot be assumed to match the Masoretic vowel markings, and that Qumran phonology must be based on the evidence from the scrolls themselves. For other languages and dialects with no surviving speakers or recordings, some of our best evidence for establishing phonology comes from spelling inconsistencies. For the Dead Sea Scrolls, such spelling inconsistencies can be found in the multiple copies of texts, especially biblical texts. But although Marty Abegg and Jarod Jacobs have published an Accordance module that collects the textual variants of biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, their data set explicitly excludes orthographic differences. This study uses the textual databases Nick Meyer and I created to produce the Lexham Dead Sea Scrolls Hebrew-English Interlinear Bible (2016) to isolate and categorize the orthographic variants in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, and identifies the contribution these make to our understanding of Qumran phonology.
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Statistics, Linguistics and the 'Biblical' Dead Sea Scrolls
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