Where Is the Aramaic Bible at Qumran? Scripture Use in the Land of Israel

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The documents at Qumran allow us to reconstruct Scripture access in the Province of Judea in the first century. From the evidence, we must assume that the Qumran community and the other Jewish communities in the land had direct access to the Hebrew Bible, generally understood it, and were interested in teaching that related directly to the Hebrew text.

Qumran has many Aramaic documents but shows a provocative lack of targum (Aramaic translations of Scripture). With nearly all the Qumran material published, we still have only two copies of an Aramaic Job and a piece of Leviticus 16 in Aramaic to represent the Aramaic Bible at Qumran. If we included the Apocrypha, we could add the four copies of Aramaic Tobit.

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  • Randall Buth

    Randall Buth

    Randall Buth is director of the Biblical Language Center and a lecturer at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Home for Bible Translators. He is a member of the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research. Buth received his doctorate in…
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