Studying the Dead Sea Scrolls Just Got Easier

The Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts (QSM) collection is a tagged database of all the nonbiblical scrolls found at Qumran—the Temple Scroll, the War Scroll, the Damascus Document, the Rule of the Community, and over 700 other scrolls. These documents provide invaluable information about Judaism in the Second Temple period.

It’s been over 10 years since we first offered this database in Libronix DLS, and much has changed—both in the contents of the QSM database and in how Logos supports Hebrew and Aramaic databases generally. We wanted to take the opportunity to get the latest data and bring this incredible tool up to our current standards.

The result: QSM just got a major update! 

What’s new

It’s never been easier to study the Dead Sea Scrolls in the original Hebrew and Aramaic. Improvements in this release include more than 100 new scrolls, bringing the total to 737 documents.

Reorganization

Several of the previously released scrolls have been reorganized to match the latest scholarship on how to reconstruct larger works from individual pieces.

Textual searches

QSM now shows up in the Textual Searches section of the Bible Word Study guide, making it easy to find instances of words from the Hebrew Bible in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This feature returns the best hits when running Bible Word Study directly from the Westminster database (BHW 4.18), since no data-type conversion is required, but it also works from several other Hebrew Bibles.

English glosses

The glossary now includes every word in the database, while the older version only had entries for those words not found in the Hebrew Bible. In addition, QSM now glosses the text on mouse hover and populates the word-selector dropdowns in various reports and search interfaces, making it easy to select the word you want.

Improved navigation

Now it’s possible to quickly navigate to individual scrolls, columns, or fragments, instead of just to specific lines in the scrolls.

Improved Dead Sea Scrolls tagging

In commentaries and other reference works, we’ve tagged Dead Sea Scrolls citations with references to Brill’s Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (DSSSE), which includes English translations and transcriptions of the most important scrolls, as well as complete bibliographic data. In this release, we’ve added a mapping of the DSSSE datatype to QSM, making it easier to link and scroll those resources together and making it possible to jump directly from tagged Dead Sea Scrolls references in your library directly to the QSM database without having to own or open DSSSE. The Brill volumes have also been updated to improve their linking with QSM and with each other.

Morphology update

The implementation of the morphology codes has been updated to function alongside the improvements made to the Westminster data types for the release of BHW 4.18, making it easy to search for morphological features across the scrolls and the Hebrew Bible at the same time.

Get yours today

If you already own the old version of QSM, you’ll receive this update automatically. (If you haven’t gotten your update update, just type “update resources” into the command bar and Logos will download it.)