Qumran Digital: Text and Lexicon

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The manuscripts from Qumran and other sites near the Dead Sea provide a unique contribution to the understanding of ancient Judaism. About one thousand fragmentary manuscripts fill the gap between biblical and rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic. Research on the corpus has experienced a tremendous upswing in the last thirty years and is currently undergoing significant changes. New image databases enable improved readings and identifications of manuscripts. Thus, the authoritative forty volume text editions (DJD) have now become outdated. Over two hundred new text editions have been created in the last twenty years, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This situation poses a problem both for Qumran studies and adjacent fields of research. A central body managing the abundance of metadata of the texts, especially the proposed different readings, does not exist, and the field still lacks a comprehensive philological dictionary of the Dead Sea Scrolls.The aim of this project is to compile digitally for the first time a complete philological dictionary (linguistic history, morphology, semantics), and to publish it online in open access, article by article, and ultimately to present the complete text of the scrolls (including the medieval manuscripts of Ben Sira, Aramaic Levi Document, and Damascus Document) alongside the various alternate readings proposed in research literature. A quarter of the Hebrew dictionary has already been completed and will be made available online at the beginning of the project. All data will be made digitally accessible in order to give users insight into the individual decisions underlying the dictionary entries and at the same time to provide the whole text-corpus with extensive material of metadata for further research of the texts themselves (syntactic analyses, epigraphic notes, etc.). All facets of the project are based on our own, internationally recognized preparatory work. A database specially developed for these tasks already exists, but needs to be adapted, first of all with regard to public web accessibility. The database, which is exemplary in the field of Digital Humanities, is currently not only in use by the Qumranwörterbuch project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities but also stands at the heart of the German-Israeli DFG project Scripta Qumranica Electronica (SQE), and it is able to serve as a foundational knowledge base for further scientific endeavors. At the end of the proposed twelve-year project, the database may continue without restriction to render valuable service in many ways to research in the field of Qumran studies and beyond.