The Texts From The Judaean Desert

Composed at the end of the editorial process, this provides a general overview of and introduction to the thirty eight volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series and includes several indexes to the whole series.

The updated inventory list reflects corrections made to details recorded imprecisely in DJD XXXIX, the data published in the last DJD volumes, inscribed archeological evidence, new fragments, changed names, new identifications, etc. Also included is an updated version of the categorized list of biblical texts.

This volume presents texts from sites in the Judaean Desert including Aramaic and Greek documentary papyri with the addition of a few Hebrew papyri. It also includes several literary texts which are mainly leather fragments of the Hebrew Bible. Unlike the documents from Qumran itself, these have the advantage of being found in a well-recorded archaeological context. The sites discussed here include Ketef Jericho, Nahal Sdeir (Nahal David), Nahal Hever and Nahal Hever/Seiyal, Nahal Mishmar, and Nahal Se'elim.

This handbook describes the scribal features of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. The findings have major implications for the study of the scrolls and the understanding of their relationship to scribal traditions in Israel and elsewhere.

Originally published 1961, this volume is being reissued to make the entire series available to students and scholars of biblical and post-biblical Judaism and early Christianity. A companion volume contains the text found in the original one-volume publication.

This volume in the series contains first and second century documents in Aramaic and Greek said to come from Nahal Se'elim and now generally held to be from Nahal Hever (the provenance of the Babatha Archive and the Bar Kokhba documents). The transitional stage of the Aramaic language isdocumented here for the first time. The Greek language and script closely resembles that of the Greek papyri from Egypt. The legal documents in the archive of Salome Komaise daughter of Levi from Mahoza (a village in the Roman province of Arabia) and similar documents from Judaea published here,like those of the Babatha archive, constitute the best and most authentic evidence for certain legal and social aspects of the life of Jews at the time. The evidence of assimilation of non-hellenized Jews to their environment contrasts with and complements that contained in contemporary and laterrabbinic sources.