Dissertation Project Marie Hell
Working title: Investigations into the prayer language of the Hebrew texts from the Dead Sea
Subject: Old Testament Theology
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Holger Gzella
The “non-biblical” writings that are part of the Dead Sea Scrolls also include those that can generally be described as “prayer texts.” This category includes various texts that differ in terms of content and form and are often classified inconsistently in the literature (e.g., as “poetic,” “hymnal,” “liturgical,” etc.). What they have in common, however, is that they are considered an important source of early Jewish prayer practices in Qumran research. The aim of my work is to examine the language of these prayer texts. To this end, their linguistic features, i.e., the vocabulary used and their style, will be analysed systematically across all prayer texts for the first time. This new philological approach aims to reveal the language specific to the texts, thereby enabling better comparability between the prayer texts and more accurate categorization. By comparing them with canonical texts from the Hebrew Bible, such as the Psalms, as well as with other early Jewish writings, the peculiarities of the prayer language of the Dead Sea texts should become apparent.