The 21 essays in this volume deal with the language and text of Hebrew corpora from the Second Temple period. They were originally presented at the Eighth International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira, held in January 2016 in Jerusalem.

Most of the papers focus on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the light of First and Second Temple Hebrew. A few of the contributions are devoted primarily to the language of Ben Sira, Samaritan Hebrew, and Mishnaic Hebrew. You will find discussions of orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, language contact, and sociolinguistics.