Online Qumran Lexicon

The Qumran Digital project of the University of Göttingen has made available an online version of the texts and entries for the Qumran Wörterbuch.

Jodi Magness Tour of Qumran

I recently came across a series of YouTube videos of Jodi Magness giving a tour of Qumran, for those who are interested.

Hebrew University Announces the Discovery of Qumran Scroll Cave 12

My wife pointed out to me last night that Hebrew University just published a press release announcing the discovery of a 12th scroll cave near Qumran. Apparently the excavators found numerous scroll jars, some linen used for wrapping the scrolls, and one piece of parchment probably from a scroll. They are currently trying to discover whether the parchment has any writing on it or not. They also found iron pickaxe heads from looters in the 1950s, all of which leads them to conclude that the cave originally contained DSS, but that they were all looted. This potentially throws further into question the already tenuous identification of the provenance of many of our scroll fragments, as it is entirely possible that some of them came from this 12th cave.

Qumran-Masada Link?

Jack Sasson brings attention to an article in Popular Archaeology noting that Ada Yardeni claims to have identified a common scribal hand in around 50 DSS, including scrolls from multiple Qumran caves and Masada. If this is correct, then it would be a very significant link between the various caves at Qumran and the finds at Masada.