Elisha Qimron

Elisha Qimron was born in Tel Aviv in 1943.[1] He pursued his academic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied Hebrew language and Bible, completing a bachelor's degree between 1963 and 1966 and a master's degree between 1967 and 1969.[1] His master's thesis examined the language of the Psalms Scroll.[1]

Qimron went on to earn a doctorate in Hebrew language at the Hebrew University in 1976, with a dissertation aimed at producing a complete grammar of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[1][2] In 1980, he and Emanuel Tov were appointed the first Israeli members of the Dead Sea Scrolls editorial team.[3]

Qimron's career centered on teaching and research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he became a full professor in 1993 and later received the title of professor emeritus.[1] He also held a lectureship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and conducted visiting research at Harvard University.[1] Beyond his university roles, he served as a researcher on the Academy of the Hebrew Language's Historical Dictionary Project and was elected a full member of the Academy in 2017.[1]

The Israel Science Foundation supported his grammatical research through a project grant for A Grammar of the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, listed at Ben-Gurion University as a 2004–2005 project.[2] A 532-page edition of that grammar was published in Jerusalem by Yad Ben Zvi Publishers in 2018, with D. Sivan listed as editor.[2]

Qimron's research has focused on deciphering and reconstructing the Dead Sea Scrolls and analyzing their language in detail.[1] His 1986 study, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, examined the orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of the Qumran texts, including subject and word indexes.[4] Ben-Gurion University's research portal describes it as the first comprehensive study of the language and notes that it remained the standard reference on the subject more than two decades after its publication.[4] The Israel Prize committee characterized the work as a pioneering foundation for studying the scrolls and the languages of ancient Israel.[1]

Among his other notable contributions, the prize committee highlighted Qimron's proposal to base Biblical Hebrew grammar on pausal forms rather than treating them as extended versions of contextual forms, and credited his book Biblical Aramaic, which went through three editions.[1] One review described his 2018 grammar as a synthesis of his scholarly insights.[5] The book's publisher presented the scrolls as reliable records of early Hebrew capable of illuminating both Biblical Hebrew and the broader history of the language.[6]

Working with John Strugnell beginning in 1979, Qimron produced the editio princeps of Miqṣat Ma'ase Ha-Torah (MMT), also translated as "Some of the Precepts of the Torah" or "Some Torah Precepts."[1] The edition was based on seven manuscript copies.[1] It was published by Oxford in 1994 as the tenth volume in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series.[7][3] The Israel Prize source describes MMT as illuminating ancient Jewish law and disputes among sectarian groups, and as preserving a perspective on legal disagreements for which the Pharisaic view had previously been better known from the Mishnah.[1] The document's language also holds importance for the study of Hebrew more broadly.[7]

Qimron's three-volume Dead Sea Scrolls: The Hebrew Writings, published in Jerusalem by Yad Yitzhak Ben-Zvi between 2010 and 2014, brought together the principal Hebrew compositions from the Qumran caves.[8] Its contents include the Damascus Document, the Thanksgiving Hymns, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, and Pesher Habakkuk, among many other texts and fragments.[8] The Israel Prize committee noted that the project incorporated approximately 100,000 textual fragments with new readings, new fragment combinations, and extensive reconstructions.[1] Qimron himself described it as "the principal work of my life."[1]

His other major editions include The Temple Scroll: A Critical Edition with Extensive Reconstructions (1996), with a bibliography by Florentino García Martínez;[9][10] The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a): A New Edition, co-edited with Donald W. Parry and published by Brill in 1999 with the Hebrew text and scroll facsimile on facing pages;[11] and new editions of the Damascus Document.[1] He also published "Celibacy in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Two Kinds of Sectarians" in The Madrid Qumran Congress (1992) and an essay on the history of early Hebrew from 1000 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. in light of the scrolls.[12][10]

The Israel Prize committee credited Qimron's combination of editing scroll texts and analyzing them through his grammatical framework with giving researchers the tools to understand the texts more precisely, reassess the writings of the Qumran community, and examine their interpretation of the Bible.[1]

Qimron received the 2018 Israel Prize in the field of Jewish Studies.[1] The prize committee cited his grammar of the scrolls, his critical editions of Hebrew texts, and his research on MMT, and stated that his contributions extended across language, Jewish law, biblical interpretation, and the history of the Second Temple period.[1] At the time of the award, he was a professor in Ben-Gurion University's Hebrew-language department and was described as a specialist in the grammar of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[13]

The most prominent legal episode in Qimron's career arose from his reconstruction of 4QMMT. Roughly 15,000 fragments of the manuscript had been found in the early 1950s; John Strugnell reduced these to approximately 60 to 70 fragments, and Qimron subsequently assembled them into a text, supplying reconstructions for roughly 40 percent of the missing portions.[14] The finished transcription — 120 lines of previously unpublished text — was circulated to several scholars before reaching Hershel Shanks, a Jewish-American lawyer and editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review.[3][14]

Shanks published Qimron's deciphered text without permission in a facsimile edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, without crediting Qimron.[14][15] The two-volume photographic edition was published in December 1991 by the Biblical Archaeology Society.[16] The dispute also raised questions for Ben Zion Wacholder and Martin Abegg, who were preparing their own preliminary edition and faced uncertainty about whether their reconstruction could use wording that overlapped with Qimron's text.[3]

Qimron sued Shanks for copyright infringement in Israeli courts. On 30 March 1993, the Jerusalem District Court ruled in Qimron's favor and awarded him approximately $55,000 in damages.[3] Both sides appealed: Shanks contested the finding of infringement, while Qimron challenged the damages amount.[17] The Israeli Supreme Court — in a ruling by Justice Yaakov Tirkel, with Justices Aharon Barak and Dorit Beinisch concurring — upheld Qimron's copyright claim.[14] The Court distinguished the ancient manuscript itself from Qimron's intellectual contribution: the arrangement of fragments, the deciphering of unclear words, and the supply of reconstructed passages.[14] It rejected Shanks's argument that copyright protection would improperly restrict academic research or privatize a cultural asset belonging to the Jewish people.[14] The Court ordered Shanks to surrender copies of the book containing the text and to pay NIS 40,000 in Qimron's legal fees.[17][14]

A scholarly review cataloged by the National Library of Israel praised Qimron's 2018 grammar as a synthesis of his insights but raised criticisms of inaccuracies, misreadings, imprecise language, and neglected linguistic features, concluding that scholars should use the resource with caution; these assessments reflect the reviewer's views rather than established errors.[5]