The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins

The Aramaic Levi Document (ALD) is known from several fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have been published in different places and by different persons. Since these fragments are related to the Aramaic Genizah Testament of Levi (GenTL), which was retrieved from the Cairo Genizah at the end of the nineteenth century, and to the Greek Testament of Levi (GkTL) in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which had been known for a long time, they are clearly important Qumran texts. The Qumran fragments of the Levi Document have been doled out in a fashion that was measured in part by the time-consuming process of identification and piecing together of the jigsaw puzzle of Cave 4 fragments and in part by the subsequent delay in publication known to everybody. The result has been that it has not been easy to keep track of these important Qumran texts or to come to any clarity about the interpretation of them or of the Aramaic in which they have been written. My purpose now is to survey the progress of the study of these Qumran texts and to comment on the language in which they have been composed. This I shall do under two headings: the Qumran Aramaic Levi Document, and the Aramaic of the Levi Document.

I begin, first, with a few words about the Aramaic Genizah Testament of Levi. Discovered in the Genizah of the Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo in 1896, GenTL is known today from a two-part fragmentary text housed, one part in the Library of Cambridge University (T-S 16.94), and the other part in the Bodleian

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