Daniel Vainstub

Throughout this paper, two factors were discussed concerning the feasibility of gathering a few thousand people at the site of Qumran once a year for a period of one week to ten days from Judea, Galilea and possibly, from Transjordan: the existence of suitable roads connecting those regions with Qumran, and the necessary amounts of food and water to provide for transport and pack animals used by the gatherers.
Scholarly consensus regarding the existence of such a network of roads, primarily based on the need for such roads for the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, enables us to infer that these roads were also used for the arrival of the Yaḥad members at Qumran.
More complex is determining the manner in which the pack animals, most likely donkeys, necessary for the travelers to make the trip to Qumran, were cared for. The evidence provided above indicates that the necessary conditions were present in close proximity to Qumran. The abundant food and drinkable water found now in 'Enot Ẓuqim Nature Reserve, extended in the past to the north, at least up to the southern bank of Naḥal Qumran, roughly 250m from the site of Qumran, allowing the gatherers to leave their animals during their stay at the site, which was easily accessible by foot. The gatherers could easily encircle the areas needed for donkey grazing with ropes to prevent their escape. Moreover, the relatively flat area of the northern bank of Naḥal Qumran, adjacent to the oasis, could also serve to set up sheds to host part of the gatherers.
The “stream of the medicine” near the site of Qumran is possibly connected with the alleged Essenes' involvement with medicinal plants.

This paper proposes the discerning of two different original etymons in the biblical Hebrew root אדר . In addition to the one most known, which evolved from the original Protosemitic root ’dr meaning “enormous”, there is another one from the original biradical base dr meaning “abundance”. This root, well attested in other Semitic languages, expanded into a triconsonantal pattern by appending an aleph to its head, and thus it resembles in its external form to the first. This interpretation sheds light on some occurrences of the root אדר in the Bible and yields a more accurate understanding of the text in which they appear.

In Eilat Mazar's excavations in the Ophel in Jerusalem, a partially preserved inscription engraved on the shoulder of a pithos was found in 2012 in a context dated to the 10th century BCE. Although close to a dozen interpretations of the inscription have been offered over time, its reading remains highly disputed. All of these interpretations consider the script to be Canaanite. In this study, it is argued that the inscription was engraved in the Ancient South Arabian script and that its language is Sabaean. The inscription reads " ]šy ladanum 5. " The aromatic ladanum (Cistus ladaniferus), rendered as lḏn in the inscription, is most probably ‫ת‬ ‫לֶ‬ ‫חֵ‬ ְ ׁ ‫ש‬ (š ǝ ḥēlet), the second component of incense according to Exod 30:34. The inscription was engraved before the locally made vessel was fired, leading to the conclusion that a Sabaean functionary entrusted with aromatic components of incense was active in Jerusalem by the time of King Solomon.

In the excavations conducted by Y. Shiloh in the City of David in Jerusalem during 1978-1985, an impressive hoard of 45 Hebrew bullae was found in the stratum destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Two of them, stamped by the same seal, were read ‫אוהל‬ ‫בן‬ ‫לאליקם̇‬ The plene spelling with waw for the vowel o in the name ‫אוהל‬ was a novelty in the Hebrew epigraphy of the First Temple period, as this was the first time that such a spelling had been found in a fully preserved and provenanced inscription. In this study, it will be shown that the third letter in the second name is, in fact, a ḥet rather than a he and, hence, that the name should be read ‫.אוחל‬ This name is built on the root wḥl, which implies that the letter waw on the bullae is not a mater lectionis. The misreading of this letter led to a series of far-reaching conclusions concerning some aspects of the pronunciation of the Hebrew spoken by the inhabitants of Judah in the 7th-6th centuries BCE and consequently the historical development of the orthography of the Hebrew script, conclusions that should now be revised.

Unlike any other group or philosophy in ancient Judaism, the yaḥad sect obliged all members of the sect to leave their places of residence all over the country and gather in the sect’s central site to participate in a special annual ceremony of renewal of the covenant between God and each of the members. The increase of the communities that composed the sect and their spread over the entire country during the first century BCE required the development of the appropriate infrastructure for hosting this annual gathering at Qumran. Consequently, the hosting of the gathering became the main function of the site, and the southern esplanade with the buildings surrounding it became the epicenter of the site.

The large group of Samaritan magical artifacts that is presented here for the first time comprise a group of thirty-seven bronze Samaritan amuletic rings and pendants and represent a significant contribution to our knowledge of Samaritan amulets in the Late Roman-Byzantine period, as they more than doubled the number of the hitherto known twenty-four Samaritan amulets. The amulets reflect a unique cultural expression of the Samaritan community in the Land of Israel during the Late Roman–Byzantine period, a time when Jews, Samaritans and Christians lived side by side, but developed very different kinds of amulets.

In 2015 during refurbishment activities in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, two inscriptions engraved in an inner wall of the cave were revealed. The first one consists of the personal name Tanḥum. The second, published here fully for the first time, reads: רביעקב חזנה ואחוי “Rabb(i)Yaʿaqov the ḥazzān and his brother/s.” The inscription was executed in two stages.
First, “Rabb(i)Yaʿaqov the ḥazzān” was engraved using well stylized letters, in line with the Jewish script on papyrus and parchment during the Byzantine period; subsequently, “and his brother/s” was added using a simpler style. The language of the inscription is clearly Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, the tongue of the majority of the Jews in the Land of Israel during the Roman and Byzantine periods. “Rabb(i)Yaʿaqov” was written as a single word, omitting one yod. אחוי can be interpreted as “his brother” or “his brothers.” The ḥazzān in the Byzantine period was the individual in charge of the proper functioning of the synagogue in all aspects, including ceremonial reading of the Torah and its explanation and translation for the public, and child education. The service of multifunctional rabbis was common in small communities.

As is well known, many Semitic languages have semantically similar roots that are identical except for one radical. The differing radicals have similar sounds or belong to the same " family " of consonants, such as the labials or the sibilants. For example, gzr, gzm, and gzl, each of which ends with a different labial, express the general meaning of cutting; while 'ls, 'lz, and 'lṣ, each of which ends with a different sibilant, express the general meaning of happiness. The purpose of this paper is to show that this phenomenon occurs also with ʼ and q by revealing 18 cases of interchange between these consonants in semantically similar roots in Hebrew and other Semitic languages , especially Arabic.*