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Making Sense of Fragmentary Qumran Aramaic Texts. Two Case Studies on Contradictory Grammatical vs. Content or Genre Considerations

Summary

Stadel examines how to read badly damaged Qumran Aramaic manuscripts. In such texts, broken lines and missing context force editors to guess at sentence boundaries and at lost words. He works through two short passages. The first is line 4 of fragments 1–3 of the Prayer of Nabonid (4Q242). The second is lines 3–5 of fragment 1 I of the so-called Magical Text (4Q560). The method is philological. He lists the possible syntactic segmentations, then checks each against what is known of Qumran Aramaic grammar and of earlier Aramaic dialects. He also weighs lexical collocations, theology, genre and overall coherence.

For 4Q242, he finds that the widely accepted reading requires an unusual parenthetical construction. A grammatically more ordinary parsing is available. For 4Q560, he shows that the editors disagree because of a method choice. One approach matches the text to much later Jewish incantations and needs emendations. The other keeps the attested letters grammatically coherent. The paper matters because a standard edition can hide real ambiguity, and readers should keep competing readings open.

Key points

  • 4Q242 survives as four fragments with fewer than eighty words in total. The disputed line has six preserved words, and the only certain clause break is the conjunction in the clause meaning "and he is a Jew."
  • The dominant reading, from J.J. Collins in DJD 22 (1996), gives forgiveness of sin to God rather than to the diviner. To do so, it treats the clause about the diviner's Jewishness as a parenthesis inserted inside its host sentence. That pattern is unattested in Qumran Aramaic and its predecessors.
  • The alternative makes "diviner" the subject of the preceding clause, so that the diviner forgives the sin. This fits the known behaviour of circumstantial clauses better, because such clauses normally follow their main clause.
  • For 4Q560, Naveh and Puech align the text with incantations about half a millennium later, which requires several emendations. Beyer reads the attested letters as grammatical Qumran Aramaic, with body parts, fever and sin. Stadel adapts Beyer's reading and reparses one form as a D-stem infinitive meaning "to act as midwife for her."
  • Funding for the study came from the Israel Science Foundation under grant no. 2154/20.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. When the input is cut off, list every possible segmentation explicitly and score each by how often its construction is attested, rather than accepting the reading everyone repeats.
  • I2. Readers of a fragment tend to prefer a parse in which the first visible word starts a sentence. Such a parse leaves no loose ends, but this is a bias of the reader, not evidence.
  • I3. A marked construction, such as a parenthesis or a circumstantial clause, needs a pragmatic reason to be there. Its markedness can therefore be used as evidence about emphasis or about which parse is right.
  • I4. Genre priors, drawn from texts that may be distant in time, can conflict with grammar priors. The choice between them should be stated openly, and both readings kept, since a single official output can mask the alternative.
  • I5. Coherence of the whole passage can act as a tie-breaker. Such signals include unified terminology across lines and a link between ailments, affected body parts and childbirth. A definite noun followed at once by its indefinite counterpart suggests two different lexemes.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): For truncated or noisy sentences, the parser could output an n-best list of attachments, each tagged with corpus frequency of its construction, instead of committing to one tree.
  • I2 (tree): At text-chunk boundaries, allow the first tokens to attach to a missing preceding clause, and flag that option rather than forcing a complete root.
  • I3 (frames): When a parse yields a rare, marked construction, prag could record the emphasis it implies, or lower the parse's score if no pragmatic motive is found.
  • I4 (learn): In silver-data agreement, record which witness used which prior (genre template vs. grammar). Keep disagreements as labelled ambiguity rather than collapsing them into one gold answer.
  • I5 (world): When building the world of a text, score candidate readings by how consistently their entities and states connect across sentences, and use that score to choose among parses.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Hebrew & Aramaic Semitic languages

 Institutions

🎓Ben-Gurion University of the NegevBeersheba · Israel34 works · 2,748 citations

Cite

Cite as Christian Stadel. 2024. Making Sense of Fragmentary Qumran Aramaic Texts. Two Case Studies on Contradictory Grammatical vs. Content or Genre Considerations. The Biblical Annals 14.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.31743/ba.17101

@article{stadel2024making,
  title = {{Making Sense of Fragmentary Qumran Aramaic Texts. Two Case Studies on Contradictory Grammatical vs. Content or Genre Considerations}},
  author = {Christian Stadel},
  journal = {The Biblical Annals 14},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.31743/ba.17101},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31743/ba.17101}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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