The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of primarily religious documents written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and some Greek. They represent some of the most significant sources for understanding Judaism in the Second Temple Period, the era that also produced the New Testament. The Scrolls are cited in many, if not most, modern Bible commentaries.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are divided into two collections. The first collection is the biblical scrolls - pieces of books found in the Hebrew Bible. The second collection is called 'sectarian manuscripts', which is all of the non-biblical scrolls. This includes commentaries on scripture, common books that would have been considered canonical by the Qumran community, even though they aren't in the Hebrew canon today (such as the Book of Enoch), and religious documents that were specific to the Qumran sect, and probably weren't used elsewhere (such as the Rule of the Community).
Dr. Martin Abegg's database for the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts provides nearly all of this second collection of texts (six hundred sixty seven manuscripts) in the original Hebrew and Aramaic. Each word in the database is given a tag for the dictionary form of that word, allowing users to execute a KeyLink look-up on the Dead Sea Scrolls to find the meaning in any Hebrew or Aramaic lexicon in the user's library. Because most of the Hebrew and Aramaic lexicons in Libronix Digital Library System are designed for use with the biblical texts, a special lexicon was also made from Dr. Abegg's database, providing short definitions for words that are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls but not found in the Hebrew Bible, or if found in the Hebrew Bible, are used in a different sense in the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts.
The QSM database also tags each word with a morphology code to allow users to search by grammatical feature, or to help the reader interpret the form of a given word. The morphology tags follow the same format as the Westminster morphology of the Hebrew Bible, already available for Libronix DLS; users of the Hebrew Bible will appreciate the consistent interface for morphological searches.
