Links to Vermes Dead Sea Scrolls

I went through the index of DSS references, and every one I hovered over did indeed come up in The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505322#Comment_505322

Sorry, that would be the index of DSS references in Paul and Palestinian Judaism.

David Weinschrott

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505323#Comment_505323

I am sorry, I don't understand your comment. Do you mean the problem lies in the Sanders resource instead of the Vermes resource?

I did get the version by wise and it works fine. Thanks.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505328#Comment_505328

I was really just answering your question concerning if the Wise volume would be linked to those specific citations. I find that almost all DSS references work with it, and when they don't, I am pretty sure it is a problem with the link. I have no idea why it's not working in the Vermes volume.

Just to be sure, what device are you using? I assume PC, but I know that a lot of times links don't come up on Android or IOS, so I believe that to be a problem with those apps. If you are using PC, I can say that the Wise version should work, but I don't know what's up with the Vermes volume. Maybe you should call Logos and ask them before you make the other purchase.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505341#Comment_505341

I don't know for sure if this is the reason, but as I look through my copy of the Wise volume, and look at the sample pages of the Vermes volume, I notice that the Wise volume has verse numbers throughout each text, where the Vermes volume does not seem to have verse numbers at all. This could be the reason that Vermes does not come up, because it has no verse numbers to link to?????

Only a guess. Someone else will know better than me, especially if they have both volumes.

Gabe Martini (Faithlife)

Do you have the Vermes edition in your list of preferred resources? I have created a list of DSS resources under my Bibles, Commentaries, Dictionaries, etc., so that I can quickly tab through them as needed.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505372#Comment_505372

I have been building resources relevant to Second Temple Judaism - Pseudepigraphia, Mishna, Josephesus, Sanders, etc. I also have Vermes translation of the DSS. When I click on a link to the DSS in Sanders Paul and Palestinian Judaism it doesn't link to Vermes volume. Is that because that volume doesn't receive links? Is there another version of the DSS in English that will receive links? I notice there is the "New Translation" by Wise, et. al. I just don't want to make a purchase if it won't link.

Hello David,

There are many possible causes for this, and it's not possible to guess which one is causing the problem you're describing:

First, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English contains only the most important DSS manuscripts. It's possible you're clicking on a link in PPJ that simply isn't in DDE.
Second, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English is a relatively simple translation, designed to make the scrolls accessible to the lay person, rather than as a study tool. In particular, it doesn't contain row numbers, only column numbers (roughly equivalent to verse numbers and chapter numbers in an English Bible). This is a limitation of the original resource, not just the Logos edition. That means that references from other resources that include row numbers won't open in DSSE. Unfortunately, this is most of them.
Third, if you have other DSS manuscripts and translations, it's possible that they might open instead of The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. If so, you can specify which resource you want to open, using prioritization: http://wiki.logos.com/Prioritizing (this is what Gabe is suggesting).
Four, scholars sometimes refer to the same manuscript with different names, or renumber manuscripts. Logos tries to make adjustments for this and get you to the right place, regardless, but very occasionally that's not possible.

This means that if you want to follow links from other resources, then you'll generally want a resource that supports row numbers, and translates most (if not all of the DSS text). So, here are the alternatives to The Dead Sea Scrolls in English:

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, contains more translations, though it is still not complete. In particular, it doesn't have fragments. But it does contains row numbers in addition to column numbers, so will open most links. It's more of a critical edition, and when two scrolls deal differently with the same material, it will try and briefly explain the differences.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition contains both translations and original language transcriptions. These come as two separate resources so you can put them in two different panels and see both, or just use one and ignore the other. It contains column and row numbers. It's the most complete English translation of the sectarian scrolls in Logos, and contains fragments as well as more substantial texts.

There is also The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. This contains an English translation of the Biblical (i.e. OT/apocyryphal) books found at Qumran, which the other resources listed above tend not to bother with.

Finally, here's an example of each of the different translations, from 1QS 5:

Dead Sea Scrolls in English: And this is the Rule for the men of the Community who have freely pledged themselves to be converted from all evil and to cling to all His commandments according to His will. They shall separate from the congregation of the men of injustice and shall unite, with respect to the Law and possessions, under the authority of the sons of Zadok, the Priests who keep the Covenant, and of the multitude of the men of the Community who hold fast to the Covenant. Every decision concerning doctrine, property, and justice shall be determined by them. They shall practise truth and humility in common, and justice and uprightness and charity and modesty in all their ways.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation: This is the rule for the men of the Yahad who volunteer to repent from all evil and to hold fast to all that He, by His good will, has commanded. They are to separate from the congregation of perverse men. They are to come together as one with respect to Law and wealth. Their discussions shall be under the oversight of the Sons of Zadok—priests and preservers of the Covenant—and according to the majority rule of the men of the Yahad, who hold fast to the Covenant. These men shall guide all decisions on matters of Law, money, and judgment. They are to practice truth together with humility, charity, justice, loving-kindness, and modesty in all their ways.

Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition: This is the rule for the men of the Community who freely volunteer to convert from all evil and to keep themselves steadfast in all he commanded in compliance with his will. They should keep apart from the congregation of the men of injustice in order to constitute a Community in law and possessions, and acquiesce to the authority of the sons of Zadok, the priests who safeguard the covenant /and/ to the authority of the multitude of the men of the Community, those who persevere steadfastly in the covenant. By their authority, decision by lot shall be made in every affair involving the law, property and judgment to achieve together truth and humility, justice and uprightness, compassionate love and seemly behaviour in all their paths.

David Weinschrott

Wow, my question has been answered in spades. I did check out the other editions you entire here. Getting the Wise version was an inexpensive fix that will do me for now while I am content with the larger fragments. It links nicely with my other resources.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505374#Comment_505374

Related to this problem, the Qumran links don't point to Dead Sea Scrolls Bible either, when the text exist in the DSSB only.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505500#Comment_505500

Related to this problem, the Qumran links don't point to Dead Sea Scrolls Bible either, when the text exist in the DSSB only.

Which Qumran links?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505507#Comment_505507

Hi Mark! I'll take this text as an example:

In the Isaiah pesher, as Flusser notes, the pinnacles of the new Jerusalem (Isa. 54:12) are the twelve chief priests, and its gates of carbuncle the twelve heads of tribes (4QpIsad, cf. Rev. 21:14; corrected text and translation in Baumgarten, 146–50). This interpretation can be related to the provision in the War Scroll for maʿamādôt consisting of twelve priests, twelve levites and twelve tribal princes (1QM ii. 1–3).

Horbury, W. (2003). Messianism among Jews and Christians : twelve biblical and historical studies (pp. 166–167). London: T&T Clark.

-> The second reference: (1QM ii. 1–3) works, points to Wise's book, this is ok.

-> The first reference, I assume it points to Isa 54:12 which exists in the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, but it does not link anywhere. DSSB has 4QIsad, and Horbury has 4QpIsad, I mean the acronym has an additional p. I am not really expert in Qumran issues, nor in the related acronyms, but I would expect the it was intended to work.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505537#Comment_505537

The first reference, I assume it points to Isa 54:12 which exists in the Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, but it does not link anywhere. DSSB has 4QIsad, and Horbury has 4QpIsad,

The 'p' stands for 'Pesher', and a pesher was a form of commentary. So 4QIsa^d is not the same as 4QpIsa^d (the latter is a commentary on [part of] Isaiah, the former is the text of [part of] Isaiah). Specifically, 4QpIsa^d is a pesher on Isaiah 54:11-12. In the numeric naming convention, 4QIsa^d is 4Q58, whilst 4QpIsa^d is 4Q164.

An English translation of 4Q164/4QpIsa^d can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, which as I mentioned before is the most complete of those available in Logos. It's only a fragment, which is why it's not found in the other works.

David Weinschrott

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505372#Comment_505372

More curious: I now have both the Vermes and the Wise edition in my library. I have Nicklesburg "Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishna. He references many documents of the DSS as well as the Egyptian CD. When I click on a reference in Logos 5 on my desktop the popup text comes up from the Wise source (DSS:NT). When I click on the same reference on my Android tablet (using the Bible app) I get the Vermes source (dsse)

So it appears now that both sources are active but on different devices. Both sources are available on both devices. However if I punch "jump to reference" on the tablet instead of getting dsse I get dss:nt (Wise).in the window.
As indicated above, I get dsse on the tablet all the time, and mostly nt on the desktop, but occasionally the dsse source pops up on the desktop - even while looking at the same document, i.e., CD-B

So now instead of no joy, I get an embarrassment of riches.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505628#Comment_505628

So it appears now that both sources are active but on different devices. Both sources are available on both devices. However if I punch "jump to reference" on the tablet instead of getting dsse I get dss:nt (Wise).in the window.
As indicated above, I get dsse on the tablet all the time, and mostly nt on the desktop

Probably the tablet and desktop have different prioritisation, so they're both choosing different resources. See (3), above. I don't know if the Android tablet isn't respecting the prioritisation you've set on the desktop, or whether you haven't set any prioritisation and they have different defaults.

occasionally the dsse source pops up on the desktop - even while looking at the same document, i.e., CD-B

Without an example it's hard to judge what might be causing this, but it's likely caused by the fact that both the Dead Sea Scrolls in English and A New Translation merge similar scrolls together into one translation in different ways. DSS:NT maintains the distinction between CD-A, CD-B and the fragments, but DSSE does not. So if a resource references CD-A or CD-B, that will open in DSS:NT, but if a resource references just CD, it will open in DSSE. Sometimes links in Logos resources try and account for this, but it's not always possible.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505665#Comment_505665

Hi Mark, I start to understand

You said that the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition is the most complete of those available in Logos.

I checked the info about the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, and it says that data contains the non-Biblical material, and is from 1997.

My next question is will there be a more complete set or version with Bible text data (English translation)?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505665#Comment_505665

I think the tagging among the various DSS resources is so hopelessly messed up, that I don't even bother to link them or click on a reference. Sometimes they connect; other times they don't. On the Libronix side where you can sort of control the link indexes, I thought I had a way to keep them linked. Not.

Every since the new Abegg volume shipped, I've been reading it a little at a time, since it's so interesting. But I rarely do any click-thru's any more, since the reliability is not there. I just use the TOCs.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505703#Comment_505703

I think the tagging among the various DSS resources is so hopelessly messed up, that I don't even bother to link them or click on a reference. Sometimes they connect; other times they don't. On the Libronix side where you can sort of control the link indexes, I thought I had a way to keep them linked. Not.

There have been problems with links to the Qumran Scrolls, but I think most of them are sorted - at least if you have the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition or Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. Perhaps some of the old resources might still have problems, but truthfully, I can't remember the last time I clicked a link and it didn't work. Can you give some examples?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505669#Comment_505669

My next question is will there be a more complete set or version with Bible text data (English translation)?

I guess none of us really know the answer to that. I doubt there would be a more complete English translation than that offered in The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. That's because there's probably very little demand for English translations of every last fragment of the Hebrew text (i.e. almost everyone who is interested in the tiny fragments will have a working knowledge of Hebrew). For most people, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation and The Dead Seal Scrolls Bible will be enough.

If you're really interested in the Biblical texts from Qumran, you should purchase the Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database. It includes all the Biblical scrolls and fragments (even the Greek ones). More importantly, if you don't have Hebrew, it has morphology, sympathetic highlighting and English glosses. That means you can hover over a word and get the English dictionary definition of the word, and perform morphological searches. It even supports sympathetic highlighting from English Bibles, which makes it easy to see differences between the text at Qumran and the MT, even from an English Bible.

I hope one day that there will be interlinear editions of the DSS in Logos, but that would be a major investment, and I'm not holding my breath.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505784#Comment_505784

logosres:dssreved2005;ref=DSSSE.4Q161_Col._ii:1;off=17

Thanks Mark. I'm here (above) today. Paging down from here, the links will begin working again. In this specific case, I scrolled the DSS-SE manually to see the alternate translation. I also tried several with a right-click DSS-SE open ... no can do.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505807#Comment_505807

Thanks Mark. I'm here (above) today. Paging down from here, the links will begin working again. In this specific case, I scrolled the DSS-SE manually to see the alternate translation. I also tried several with a right-click DSS-SE open ... no can do.

Thanks. The reason that DSS:NT doesn't link with DSSSE for 4Q161 is because the two resources refer to the scrolls slightly differently. DSS:NT says "Col. 2 (Frags. 2-6)", so Logos has tagged as "column 2", whilst DSSSE says "Frags. 2-6 (col. ii)", so Logos has tagged it as "fragments 2-6". I guess the ideal would be for both resources to have both tags. Perhaps we should suggest that with the Report Typo feature.

Inconsistent referencing to the DSS has plagued academia, although it's settling down now. Overall, I think Logos does a very good job, and my experience is that problems such as the one you refer to are very much the exception, rather than the rule.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505807#Comment_505807

Hi Mark,

do I understand correctly, that I would need both Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database and The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition to see the links work. I could put those into my wish list if the links are commonly known to work. I can read Hebrew, it just takes time.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505842#Comment_505842

Probably the areas we deal with in the DSS are different. I have no trouble at all finding tags that go nowhere.

I recently got a Pagewhite and somehow it managed to suggest Mark Smith's Israel & Monotheism. I have quite a number of his books in Logos and this one would have been a natural due to zillions of Ugarit / ANET /COS writings. But I've no confidence what Logos would choose for links (scheme), not to mention reliability. Better just to spend the $20.

I guess after reading so many DSS conversations on linking, and having so many people on the forum that write maintenance scripts for broken links (me!), Logos tagging discipline isn't a major selling point for me.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505867#Comment_505867

do I understand correctly, that I would need both Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database and The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition to see the links work. I could put those into my wish list if the links are commonly known to work. I can read Hebrew, it just takes time.

I'm not saying that you need those two volumes. I am saying that:

DSSSE has more coverage that DSS:NT, because it includes more fragments (but DSS:NT has most, perhaps 90%?).
That if you want the the actual text of individual fragments of Biblical scrolls, then you need QBDSSDB. If you only want an English translation based on a 'critical edition' of the fragments, then the DSS Bible will do. If you only want to know which fragments cover precisely which passages, then the DSSSE will do.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505873#Comment_505873

Denise,

I wonder if we're talking about different things — linking two resources together when they scroll, and clicking on links to open another resource. I'll repeat that I rarely find problems with clicking on DSS links nowadays (though it used to be a mess), and perhaps if you don't bother with that any more, you're missing out. Of course I do have the DSSSE, which helps a lot. I'm 99% sure that L4/5 doesn't do anything different from L3 in this regard. Linking two resources together is more problematic, simply because different resources often use different referencing schemes, and that inevitably causes problem (the amount of hard work that's gone into making this function properly just for Bibles is astonishing, and the DSS are, if anything, even more complex).

I'm not saying there aren't still a few problems in a few resources, but if you're aware of anything widespread, it would be better to post it here so that we could get Logos to correct it.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505877#Comment_505877

Hi Mark!

I think I am getting it now: each DSS Bible verse is a combination (critical edition) of the manuscripts, thus links to manuscripts do not point to the DSS Bible.

Now I also see the use of the DSS Bible superscripts, they give some info from the related fragments

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505884#Comment_505884

I think I am getting it now: each DSS Bible verse is a combination (critical edition) of the manuscripts, thus links to manuscripts do not point to the DSS Bible.

Yes, that's right. If you click on the * next to each chapter number in the DSS Bible, you'll get the list of scrolls that were used for that chapter. If you click on the footnotes, you'll get the critical notes. Isaiah 42 is a good chapter that shows this, and footnote 842 as just one example.

If you have the Qumran Biblical Database, you'd be able to click on the links in those pop-ups, and go straight to the Hebrew transcriptions. If you have the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition instead, you'd get to a summary of that manuscript which would tell you which verses were covered in which columns, but you won't see a transcription (see below).

The picture below shows what you see when you hover over the 4QIsa^h reference.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505884#Comment_505884

Veli ... in addition to Mark's excellent advice and illustrations, here's another 'route' that Logos provides. I'm in Isa 42.5 with the varient reading shown in the ISV (top-left), which uses a similar reading in the DSS Bible (top-right). I have the DSS Biblical index (lower-left) linked to both and it shows the various fragments associated with the verse (with 4Q62 being similar to MT, Peshitta and Targum Jonathan).

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/505893#Comment_505893

Thanks Mark, Denise and others!

I've bought DSS-SE and QBDSSDB and the links have worked fine so far!

By the way, I did full Rebuild Index, and with my new computer which is multicore and has much more memory, the indexing went very fast. I assume it is the amount of memory that does the trick, as the Logos engine is not utilizing the multiprocessor?