Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance. Vol. 1: The Non-Biblical Texts from Qumran, The

Martin G. Abegg, with James E. Bowley and Edward M. Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance. Vol. 1: The Non-Biblical Texts from Qumran. Leiden: Brill, 2003. xv+958 pp. $269.00.

The publication of this concordance of the non-biblical texts from Qumran meets a need that biblical scholars have felt for decades. When the first concordance for Qumran texts was published by Karl Georg Kuhn (Konkordanz zu den Qumrantexten [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960]), making accessible the major Qumran texts from 1Q, CD, 6QD, and several 4Q texts, it was obvious that a new concordance would be needed once all Qumran texts were published. Since the publication of the Qumran material progressed all too slowly, several concordances were published for individual texts (e.g., for 4QShirShabb, cf. Carol A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985]; for 11QMelchizedek, cf. H. P. Richter, "Konkordanz zu 11QMelkîsédeq [ed. É. Puech]," RQâ12 [1987]: 515-18). On occasion newly published texts were added to Kuhn's concordance (K. G. Kuhn, "Nachträge zur 'Konkordanz zu den Qumrantexten,'" RQ4 [1963]: 163-234; U. Dahmen, "Nachträge zur Qumran-Konkordanz," ZAH4 [1991]: 213-35; ZAH8 [1995]: 340-45). This frustrating situation was relieved to some extent by the publication of the Graphic Concordance to the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. James H. Charlesworth, with R. E. Whitaker, L. G. Hickerson, S. R. A. Starbuck, and L. T. Stuckenbruck [Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1991]). Apart from the fact that this was essentially a computer printout, presented in small print and not proportionally spaced, making it difficult even for the specialist to use the concordance, each entry was listed in its attested form, which means that under the letter BET the user finds all words which are prefixed by the particle BET, and under WAW all words preceded by the copula; this means that it is very difficult to know whether one has located all the occurrences of the word in the Qumran corpus (see the complaints of P. R. Davies, loudaios Review 2 [June 1992]: 14). These drawbacks of the Graphic Concordance continued to make the publication of a "Qumran concordance" a major desideratum.

Martin Abegg's Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance [DSSC] is a major publication event in Qumran research, finally providing scholars with the access to the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls that they have desired for a long time. Martin Abegg, co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western. University, British Columbia, has been involved in Dead Sea Scrolls research for many years (see most recently Emanuel Tov and Martin G. Abegg, The Texts From the Judaean Desert: Indices and an Introduction to the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert Series [DJD 39; Oxford: Clarendon, 2002], a publication that, incidentally, included a "Concordance of Proper Nouns in the Non-biblical Texts from Qumran," pp. 229-84). The DSSC I consists of a concordance of Hebrew (pp. 1-771), Aramaic, including Nabatean-Aramaic (pp. 773-946), and Greek (pp. 947-50) words, followed by an Appendix I (concordance of signs for numbers, pp. 953-56) and an Appendix II (typographical and transcriptional errors in the text editions, pp. 957-58). The concordance of the non-biblical texts contains 3,771 distinct Hebrew, 1,930 Aramaic, and 36 Greek words (in 111,141 entries in Hebrew, 21,628 in Aramaic, and 65 in Greek). The concordance of the non-biblical texts from Qumran is the first in a series of three projected volumes: vol. 2 will publish a concordance of the biblical texts from Qumran; vol. 3 of the texts from other sites in the Judean desert. The total number of entries will be around 180,000, which is nearly half the size of a concordance for the OT.

The "General Introduction" (pp. ix-xvii) begins by describing the concordance and its contents. The DSSC presents for the first time a concordance of, and thus all the words used in, all the non-biblical Qumran texts and thus serves as an index for all 40 volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD, 1955-2004, vols. 37 and 40 still to be published) as well as for the publications of Qumran texts outside of the DJD series, viz. CD, 1QpHab, 1QapGen, 1QS, 1QM (using the text of the J. H. Charlesworth edition The Dead Sea Scrolls: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek Texts with English Translations, published by Mohr-Siebeck and Westminster John Knox, since 1994), IQH^sup a^ (M. G. Abegg, electronic edition 2002), and 11Q19 (Y. Yadin, The Temple Scroll, Jerusalem 1983), as well as 41 texts from 4Q which are yet to be published. The ostraca published in DJD 38 (KhQ1-KhQS) are included, while texts from other sites in the Judean Desert will be included in a subsequent volume of the concordance. Abegg refrained from including more appropriate reconstructions than those suggested by the editors of the DJD texts, with the sensible argument that the concordance was designed to reflect the extant standard editions and that a consistent re-editing of the entire corpus of Qumran texts would have delayed publication, for many years (p. ix). While the biblical texts of Qumran will be concorded in a subsequent volume of DSSC, biblical quotations in the non-biblical texts, biblical lemmas in the pesher texts and 4QReworked Pentateuch and 4Q522 have been included in the present volume.