Do Qumran Inscriptions Show Hellenization of Qumran Residents?

Abstract

The epigraphic corpus of Qumran has been known completely since the publication of André Lemaire in <Khirbet Qumrân et ‘Aïn Feshkha, II>, by Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Jan Gunneweg in 2003. The publication of all the inscriptions in Khirbet Qumran, the associated caves and ‘Aïn Feshkha have shown something strange: Qumran residents might have been more Hellenized than the usual picture given by Qumran scrolls. Most of the inscriptions are personal names (or nicknames). Some of them have been written by members of the Qumran community. We propose to compare these inscriptions with contemporaneous epigraphic corpora discovered around the Dead Sea and with personal names noted in the Qumran nonliterary texts.