Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

How does almsgiving purge sins? / Gary A. Anderson -- Mistaken repetitions or double readings? / Moshe Bar-Asher -- Linguistic innovations in Ben Sira Manuscript F / Haim Dihi -- Relative ha- : a late biblical Hebrew phenomenon? / Mats Eskhult -- Shifts in word order in the Hebrew of the Second Temple period / Steven E. Fassberg -- Plene writing of the Qōṭēl pattern in the Dead Sea scrolls / Gregor Geiger -- Constituent order in ...-clauses in the Hebrew of the Dead Sea scrolls / Pierre Van Hecke -- Terminological modifications in biblical genealogical records and their potential chronological implications / Avi Hurvitz -- Imperative clauses containing a temporal phrase and the study of the diachronic syntax in ancient Hebrew / Jan Joosten -- Laws of wisdom : sapiential traits in the Rule of the community (1QS 5-7) / Reinhard G. Kratz -- Aspects of poetic stylization in Second Temple Hebrew : a linguistic comparison of the Songs of the sabbath sacrifice with ancient piyyuṭ / Noam Mizrahi -- The literary use of biblical language in the works of the Tannaim / Matthew Morgenstern -- The third personal masculine plural pronoun and pronominal suffix in early Hebrew / Elisha Qimron -- On the prepositional object with bet in Qumran Hebrew / Jean-Sébastien Rey -- From the "foundation" of the Temple to the "foundation" of a community : on the semantic evolution of *ʼUŠ ... in the Dead Sea scrolls / Ursula Schattner-Rieser -- Syndetic binomials in Second Temple period Hebrew / David Talshir -- Scribal features of two Qumran scrolls / Emanuel Tov -- The non-construct ... in the Dead Sea scrolls / Alexey (Eliyahu) Yuditsky -- Between "righteousness" and "alms" : a semantic study of the lexeme ... in the Dead Sea scrolls / Francesco Zanella -- Content clauses in the Dead Sea scrolls / Tamar Zewi.

The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Ben Sira can be properly understood only in the light of all contemporary Second Temple period sources. With this in mind, 20 experts from Israel, Europe, and the United States convened in Jerusalem in December 2008. These proceedings of the Twelfth Orion Symposium and Fifth International Symposium on the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira examine the Hebrew of the Second Temple period as reflected primarily in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book of Ben Sira, Late Biblical Hebrew, and Mishnaic Hebrew. Additional contemporaneous sources - inscriptions, Greek and Latin transcriptions, and the Samaritan oral and reading traditions of the Pentateuch - are also noted.