How did language and literary really “work” in the multilingual Judaea of Herod the Great, Jesus, Josephus, and Simon b. Kosiba? This is the question that Michael Wise seeks to answer in his detailed and pioneering study of 145 documents discovered in the caves along the western shore of the Dead Sea. Wise, currently serving as Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Languages at Northwestern College, is well-known for his best-selling books on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wise’s popular and influential writings, however, took him away from his self-proclaimed first academic love—Greek literature. Consequently, in more recent times, Wise entered a second doctoral program to pursue anew his first love, and the monograph under review here is a revision of his second Ph.D. dissertation.
The current scholarly consensus is that the Judea of the first century AD was a trilingual society, using Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. Yet the precise relationship...
