The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora. Referring to the Masoretic Text, masorah specifically means the diacritic markings of the text of the Jewish scriptures and the concise marginal notes in manuscripts of the Tanakh which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words. It was primarily copied, edited, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries of the Common Era (CE). The oldest known complete copy, the Leningrad Codex, dates from the early 11th century CE.
The Pharisees were a Jewish social movement and a school of thought in the Levant during the time of Second Temple Judaism. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic beliefs became the foundational, liturgical, and ritualistic basis for Rabbinic Judaism.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period. They were discovered over a period of 10 years, between 1946 and 1956, at the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered to be a keystone in the history of archaeology with great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, along with extra-biblical and deuterocanonical manuscripts that preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. At the same time, they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. Almost all of the 15,000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, located in the city of Jerusalem. The Israeli government's custody of the Dead Sea Scrolls is disputed by Jordan and the Palestinian Authority on territorial, legal, and humanitarian grounds — they were mostly discovered following the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and were acquired by Israel after Jordan lost the 1967 Arab–Israeli War — whilst Israel's claims are primarily based on historical and religious grounds, given their significance in Jewish history and in the heritage of Judaism.
Qumran is an archaeological site in the West Bank managed by Israel's Qumran National Park. It is located on a dry marl plateau about 1.5 km (1 mi) from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, about 10 km (6 mi) south of the historic city of Jericho, and adjacent to the modern Israeli settlement and kibbutz of Kalya.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 7Q5 is the designation for a small Greek papyrus fragment discovered in Qumran Cave 7. It contains about 18 legible or partially legible Greek letters and was published in 1962 as an unidentified text. The editor assigned the fragment to a date between 50 BCE and 50 CE on the basis of its handwriting. In 1972, the Spanish papyrologist Jose O'Callaghan argued that the papyrus was in fact a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 52 and 53. While most scholars have been unpersuaded by this argument, a vocal minority continue to support the identification of the fragment as a part of the Gospel of Mark.
The Damascus Document is an ancient Hebrew text known from both the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is considered one of the foundational documents of the ancient Jewish community of Qumran.
Emanuel Tov, is a Dutch–Israeli biblical scholar and linguist, emeritus J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible Studies in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been intimately involved with the Dead Sea Scrolls for many decades, and from 1991, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.
The Judaean Desert or Judean Desert is a desert in the West Bank and Israel that lies east of Jerusalem and descends to the Dead Sea. Under the name El-Bariyah, it has been nominated to the Tentative List of World Heritage Sites in the State of Palestine, particularly for its monastic ruins.
The Teacher of Righteousness is a figure found in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, most prominently in the Damascus Document. This document speaks briefly of the origins of the sect, probably Essenes, 390 years after the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and after 20 years of looking blindly for the way. "God... raised for them a Teacher of Righteousness to guide them in the way of His heart".
John Strugnell was an English Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Divinity School and a former editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls project. Strugnell became, at 23, the youngest member of the team of scholars led by Roland de Vaux, formed in 1954 to edit the Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem. He was studying Oriental languages at Jesus College, Oxford when Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver, a lecturer in Semitic philology, nominated him to join the Scrolls editorial team.
Elisha Qimron is an academic who studies ancient Hebrew. He took his Doctor of Philosophy in 1976 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with the dissertation The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
4Q175, also known as The Testimonia, is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and was found in Cave 4 at Qumran in the West Bank. Only one sheet long, 4Q175 is a collection of scriptural quotations seemingly connected to a messianic figure. The manuscript was written in Hasmonean script of the early 1st century BCE and was edited by John Marco Allegro.
Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) is the official 40-volume publication that serves as the editio princeps for the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is published by Oxford University Press.
Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret Of Qumran is a book by Norman Golb which intensifies the debate over the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls, furthering the opinion that the scrolls were not the work of the Essenes, as other scholars claim, but written in Jerusalem and moved to Qumran in anticipation of the Roman siege in 70 AD.
The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and ended with the First Jewish–Roman War and the Roman siege of Jerusalem.
Joseph M. Baumgarten was an Austrian-born Semitic scholar known for his knowledge in the field of Jewish legal texts from biblical law to Mishnaic law and including the legal texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Baumgarten immigrated to the United States with his family in 1939 as a result of the Anschluss, Germany's occupation of Austria in 1938. In 1950, he was ordained a rabbi at Mesivta Torah Vodaath, a prominent Brooklyn yeshiva. He married Naomi Rosenberg in 1953.
Biblical Hebrew orthography refers to the various systems which have been used to write the Biblical Hebrew language. Biblical Hebrew has been written in a number of different writing systems over time, and in those systems its spelling and punctuation have also undergone changes.
The manuscript 4Q120 is a Septuagint manuscript (LXX) of the biblical Book of Leviticus written on papyrus, found at Qumran. The Rahlfs-No. is 802. Paleographically it dates from the first century BCE. Currently the manuscript is housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.
Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus Scroll, known also as 11QpaleoLev, is an ancient text preserved in one of the Qumran group of caves, and which provides a rare glimpse of the script used formerly by the Israelites in writing Torah scrolls during pre-exilic history. The fragmentary remains of the Torah scroll is written in the Paleo-Hebrew script and was found stashed away in cave no. 11 at Qumran, showing a portion of Leviticus. The scroll is thought to have been penned by the scribe between the late 2nd century BCE to early 1st century BCE, while others place its writing in the 1st century CE.
