The dissertation traces the development and interpretation of the Israelite institution of the jubilee year from its ancient Near Eastern analogues and antecedents to the Jewish religious writings of the last centuries before Christ. The jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25 is co…
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The purpose of this dissertation is to examine various questions surrounding the Greek translation of the Book of Enoch and to provide a description of the translation technique in the light of the Aramaic original recently recovered at Qumran. Chapter 1 describes the discovery …
This study identifies the literary forms used in the admonitions of 4QInstruction to better assess the relationship between that text and both biblical wisdom and the broader wisdom tradition. This study determines that the admonitions rely on traditional wisdom forms for their …
The Book of Jubilees uses the genre "apocalypse" to express a worldview that differs significantly from the cluster of ideas typically expressed by contemporary apocalypses. Jubilees has often been viewed as a borderline or ambiguous case among apocalypses. When viewed with the …
The sect of the Covenanters, best known from the Rule Scrolls discovered in the Qumran caves, was one of a myriad of voluntary associations that flourished in the Greco-Roman period. Its features have many analogies with the features of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian associations. I…
Aramaic was one of the most widely used languages of the ancient Near East. Although most of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran are written in Hebrew, a small number use a variety of Aramaic. All of Qumran Aramaic (QA) has reached published form, though a few minor manuscripts hav…
This dissertation attempts to show how texts from the Ancient Near East, texts in the Hebrew Bible, and one text from Qumran describe life-threatening crises by means of the Birth Metaphor. Can two concepts such as birth and crisis even be compared? Birth and crisis are existent…
This study is concerned with pervasive literary representations of priesthood in the Dead Sea Scrolls and what they indicate about the Qumran community. Two images are treated, otherworldly priesthood (part one) and end-time priesthood (part two). It is found that these images a…
In this dissertation I clarify the significance of verb form selection in the Qumran sectarian texts by determining the extent to which the semantic value of the Hebrew finite verb is temporal, aspectual, or modal in the selected corpus. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect…
The purpose of the dissertation was to investigate the first ten psalms in the Qumran Psalms Scroll (11QPsa) for evidence of lexical, thematic, and structural connections, the thesis being that the Scroll was compiled through a deliberate process wherein specific psalms were pla…
This dissertation analyses the linguistic parallels between the Gospel of John and the sectarian Qumran document, the Rule, and investigates the degree of semantic continuity in their respective uses of truth terminology. The major premise is that the Rule provides linguistic cl…
The dissertation is a study of the concept of ‘mystery’ in Second Temple Judaism, especially as this concept is expressed by the Hebrew and Aramaic word raz. It characterizes the raz-concept as one that arises out of Israel’s prophetic and sapiential traditions, is an important …
Interpreters of Hebrews have long questioned whether prior traditions influenced the presentation of Jesus as messianic high priest in Hebrews. Suggestions have ranged from earlier Jewish (especially Philonic) or Christian traditions to Gnosticism, while others have asserted tha…
It is no exaggeration to say that recent scholarship on ancient Jewish purity law is vast. Yet despite so many recent achievements, some important questions remain largely unaddressed. One such topic is the question of the defiling force of sin, or in other words, the impurity o…
The often fragmentary Aramaic texts preserved by the Qumran community represent a large collection of well edited texts, whose publications have triggered numerous contributions that have brought a significantly clearer understanding of them. Little attention, however, has been …
During the period of the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH ) was so sacred that it had become an ineffable name. This thesis studies alternations in the usage of the Tetragrammaton in non-biblical manuscripts at Qumran through an analysis of scriptural qu…
Scholars have been divided over how to interpret the relationship between Palestinian Jews and the Roman Empire during the Herodian period (40 BCE-70 CE). This thesis attempts to understand this relationship through a model of Romanization based on theories of identity negotiati…
The Dead Sea Scrolls provide significant insight into the ancient world of Jewish interpretation of the Bible during the Second Temple period. Several manuscripts, dating to the first century B.C., reveal how Jews interpreted and employed various aspects of the Genesis Flood. Sc…
The morphological marking, or non-marking, of the definiteness of a noun phrase in the Aramaic language has changed over time. At the time of Imperial Aramaic (IA) the emphatic state of the noun was used to indicate definiteness, a usage that was passed on to other dialects due …