Why did the Qumran community write in Hebrew?

• Author: Weitzman, Steve

The discovery of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabatean texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls is often cited as evidence that the Qumran sect was multilingual.(1) There is even more impressive evidence, however, that the sect preferred Hebrew as its principal literary language. The vast majority of the manuscripts found at Qumran, 438 non-biblical manuscripts, are in Hebrew, as against 104 in Aramaic, 18 in Greek, and 2 in Nabatean.[2] More tellingly, Hebrew is the language of virtually every text believed to have been written within the Qumran sect itself - The Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, the Thanksgiving Hymns, and so on.(3) Although other languages may have been read or spoken by the sect, it consistently chose Hebrew for literary expression.

At first glance, there is nothing particularly puzzling about this choice. Hebrew had been the native language of Israel in the First Temple period, and it survived as a written language - probably as a spoken language also - well into the Hellenistic Roman era.(4) For many historians of Hebrew the use of this language at Qumran seems a straightforward example of linguistic maintenance, the perpetuation into the Second Temple period of the native language of Palestinian Jews.(5) In multilingual societies such as Hellenistic-Roman Palestine, however, where there can be powerful pressure to communicate in the languages of more pervasive speech communities, adhering to one's ancestral tongue can be a much more complex phenomenon than it seems. As sociolinguists have pointed out, a community's social organization and belief system, its relation to other speech communities, and other factors can all affect whether the community seeks to maintain a native language or adopt the language of others.(6) Thus, even if we grant that in its use of Hebrew the Qumran sect was simply perpetuating a choice of language it had inherited from earlier generations of Palestinian Jews, the sect's use of Hebrew still raises many questions. Why did the sect consistently avoid using the other languages of Hellenistic-Roman Palestine in its own writing? What did using Hebrew mean to this community? And was the sect's use of Hebrew related in any way to its organization, ideology, or relation to other speech communities?

The answers we seek require us to consider how Hebrew was used and perceived in the larger social world of which the Qumran sect was part. Many scholars believe that there was a conscious revival of Hebrew in the second century B.C.E., a linguistic development tied to the upsurge in religious nationalism during the Maccabean Revolt.(7) Hebrew, written in paleo-Hebrew script, appears in the legends of Hasmonean coins, and it is the language of pro-Hasmonean works like Daniel 8-12 and probably 1 Maccabees (the latter now appears in Greek but is originally thought to have been written in Hebrew).(8) The Qumran sect, also emerging some time in the Hasmonean period, exhibited many of the same linguistic behaviors: it wrote in Hebrew; it often used biblicizing style; there is even evidence that it copied some manuscripts, especially biblical texts, in a paleo-Hebrew script.(9) The parallels suggest that the use of Hebrew at Qumran has to be viewed as part of a larger sociolinguistic trend in Judea in the Hellenistic period, one probably tied to the increasingly central role of biblical literature in the formulation of Jewish identity.(10)

With all the factionalism and religious diversity of Hellenistic Roman Palestine, however, it should come as no surprise that for some Jews the type of Hebrew to use, and the precise connotations of using it, were guided by different ideological orientations and social affiliations.(11) Forty years ago, Chaim Rabin argued such a point, claiming that the Qumran sect developed its distinctive Hebrew, an archaizing dialect purged of colloquialisms, in conscious opposition to Mishnaic Hebrew, supposedly the dialect of the sect's Pharisaic opponents.(12) If Rabin is correct, the significance of using Hebrew for the Qumran sect - while sharing many aspects with Hasmonean language ideology - was colored by its distinctive beliefs, organization, and self-image.

But was Rabin correct? Many of his specific claims about Qumran Hebrew and its relation to Mishnaic Hebrew were not borne out by subsequent evidence.(13) However, Rabin's larger claim - that the formal characteristics of Qumran Hebrew were shaped by its religious ideology - had remained untested until recently. In a forthcoming article entitled "Qumran Hebrew as an Anti-language," W. Schniedewind updates Rabin's thesis by describing Qumran Hebrew as an "anti-language" created in conscious opposition to the "standard" dialect of the normative community.(14) Anti-languages, dialects developed by underclass groups such as prison communities, relexicalize the standard dialect, creating distinctive lexicons for activities of special concern to the subculture, while inverting forms recognized as mainstream.(15) Schniedewind uses this notion to explain the following differentiating traits of Qumran Hebrew: coded terminology ("Teacher of Righteousness," "Wicked Priest," etc.), the avoidance of Aramaic and colloquial language, archaizing language, and special orthography.

Following Rabin, Schniedewind identifies Mishnaic Hebrew as the dialect rejected by the Qumran sect. However, this is debatable since, as reflected in extant manuscripts, what is known as Mishnaic Hebrew is not a single dialect at all but a conflation of different linguistic varieties from both Palestine and Babylonia.(16) Moreover, some of the language-features linked by Schniedewind to the Qumran sect's ideology can be attributed to nonideological factors. Different degrees of biblicizing Hebrew have been identified in generically distinct sections of individual Qumran texts, for example, suggesting that genre played some role in the sect's use of archaizing language.(17) This is not to reject the basic theses of Rabin and Schniedewind - only to emphasize that with so little information about the sociolinguistic contexts for Qumran Hebrew, it is difficult to draw causal links between the isoglosses of this dialect and the sect's ideology.

There is another resource for investigating how the sect's belief system may have influenced its linguistic behavior. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls are a few brief passages, one published only a few years ago, that explicitly refer to Hebrew. These passages reveal what their authors believed about the origins of Hebrew, its characteristics, and its advantages over other languages. While statements that a typical user makes about his language do not necessarily coincide with actual practice, they often do - as sociolinguist Harold Schiffman has pointed out: "beliefs . . . that a speech community has about its language are part of the social conditions that affect the maintenance and transmission of that language."(18)

The two texts on which we will focus - 4Q464 and Jubilees - were both found at Qumran (Jubilees is also known from later translations), but some scholars believe that they were probably composed before the rise of the Qumran sect, probably within some incipiently sectarian community. At best, therefore, we might only use these documents to reconstruct the beliefs of the unknown group from which the Qumran community emerged.

4Q464, JUBILEES, AND REVERSING THE CURSE OF BABEL

4Q464, also known as "An Exposition on the Patriarchs," consists of eleven fragments which appear to belong to the same composition.(19) So little of this text survives that one cannot be certain of its genre or purpose.(20) Notwithstanding the tattered nature of 4Q464, however, a brief passage in fragment three, column one is well enough preserved to have merited a separate article by the text's editors, Stone and Eshel:(21)

line 5] confused [Hebrew Text Omitted] line 6]m to Abrah{r}am(22) [Hebrew Text Omitted] line 7 for ever, since he/it [Hebrew Text Omitted] line 8 r]ead the holy tongue [Hebrew Text Omitted] line 9 I will make] the [Hebrew Text Omitted] people pure of speech [Hebrew Text Omitted]

While this tiny fragment does not reveal very much, two notions are evident. First, the fragment uses in line 8 the phrase "holy tongue" in reference to Hebrew. This is the earliest known attestation of the expression "holy tongue," and I assume it refers to Hebrew here because that is its meaning in later Jewish sources.(23) Second, the phrase "holy tongue" seems to he mentioned in connection with some event from the life of Abraham, just after Genesis 11 when God "confused" the languages of humankind. The link to the Babel story is suggested by the letters [Greek Text Omitted] in line 5, possibly some form the verb "confuse" in Genesis 11;(24) by the citation of Zeph. 3:9 in line 9 "I will make the people pure of speech," which in several later Jewish sources is connected to the Babel story (e.g., Buber's Midrash Tanhuma, [section]28 fol. 286(25)); and by parallels with other early Jewish texts which associate Hebrew with Genesis 11. The latter include Jub. 12:25-27, discussed below, which claims that an angel revealed Hebrew to Abraham shortly after the Babel incident; and targums which insert the expressions "holy tongue" or "the language of the sanctuary" in Gen. 11:1.(26)

Based on such evidence, Stone and Eshel reconstruct this passage in 4Q464 as a prophecy anticipating a time when the curse of Babel, the curse of heteroglossia, will be lifted and all people will again speak the "pure" language of Hebrew. A similar idea appears in the Testament of Judah, which - although it does not refer to Hebrew explicitly - asserts that in the eschatological age "when Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will arise to life . . . there will be one people of the Lord and one language" (25:1-3). It has an even closer parallel in the passage from Midrash Tanhuma cited above which not only predicts that all peoples will speak Hebrew...