Hi Reid,
Thanks for the interesting question. First of all we get biblical manuscripts at Qumran. Even though many of the less common linguistic details may vary between a Dead Sea Scroll and the traditional Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible books, the basic features of language don't change in the various copies of biblical texts we have. Second, in the various non-Hebrew Bible compositions found at Qumran, like the Community Rule (1QS) or the Pesher on Habakkuk, we get Hebrew of a similar nature to the biblical books, with sometimes some distinctive "Qumran" Hebrew features (e.g., HU'AH instead of HU' for "he"). Every text we looked at from anywhere in the Hebrew Bible has a few so-called "Late Biblical Hebrew" features (i.e. features suggested to be characteristic of the LBH books). This is no different with the Qumran scrolls we investigated. One thing we didn't find was a composition at Qumran that looked like the core "Late Biblical Hebrew" books (Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles) with their very high accumulation of certain linguistic features.
Hi Reid,
Thanks for the interesting question. First of all we get biblical manuscripts at Qumran. Even though many of the less common linguistic details may vary between a Dead Sea Scroll and the traditional Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible books, the basic features of language don't change in the various copies of biblical texts we have. Second, in the various non-Hebrew Bible compositions found at Qumran, like the Community Rule (1QS) or the Pesher on Habakkuk, we get Hebrew of a similar nature to the biblical books, with sometimes some distinctive "Qumran" Hebrew features (e.g., HU'AH instead of HU' for "he"). Every text we looked at from anywhere in the Hebrew Bible has a few so-called "Late Biblical Hebrew" features (i.e. features suggested to be characteristic of the LBH books). This is no different with the Qumran scrolls we investigated. One thing we didn't find was a composition at Qumran that looked like the core "Late Biblical Hebrew" books (Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles) with their very high accumulation of certain linguistic features.