Elisha Qimron

Who is Elisha Qimron?

Elisha Qimron is an academic in the study of ancient Hebrew, in which he took his PhD in 1976 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writing his dissertation on The Hebrew of the Scrolls. Currently, he is a professor in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. For several decades he has been one of the team of international scholars working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular on the texts found in Cave 4 at Qumran.

In 1979 Qimron was co-opted by John Strugnell, the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team, to assist in completing long-overdue work on the Halakhic Letter, on which Strugnell had been working alone since 1959. The work on the fragments was eventually completed and published in 1994. Qimron was the first Israeli scholar on the team.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s many scholars felt frustrated at the delay in publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was generally known that most of the texts had been translated, but were still not available to researchers.