Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Herman Meester" <crazymulgogi AT gmail.com>]

2006/5/24, Gene Gardner <g_gardner1234 AT yahoo.com>:
> Could anyone on the list give me a linguistic breakdown of the name
> Qumran?

Fully it's Khirbet Qumrān, Arabic, naturally. Khariba, or Khirba خربة, is
"ruin(s)" (cf. Hebrew charev, חרב). Qumrān قمران seems to have a dualis -ān
ending. So we have "Ruin of 2 QMRs". Qamar, then, commonly means "moon",
also in the sense "satellite", so "big light, other than stars, in the sky".
Al-qamarān, meaning, "the 2 moons", is used for "sun and moon". Qumrān or
qamarān are virtually the same, because short vowels and the way they are
put in the consonant structure differ regionally.
So does Khirbet Qumrān mean: "The ruin of Sun and Moon" or "the Ruin of the
Two Moons"?
I have no idea. The best thing to do would be to consult a scientific
etymology of Levantine place names. Their writers may have just gone to the
place and asked "old and wise" people around what the name really means.

(Btw., there is another meaning for the root QMR, or a different root QMR,
that has to do with "gambling".)

None of which has anything to do with B-Hebrew, of course.
Except for the fact that a few caves near the ruin were chosen to hide
Hebrew (a.o.) manuscripts in. The ruin itself has little or nothing to do
with the scrolls; it's a strategic military site where the supposed
sectarians writing the mss. wouldn't have been living.

If you want me to really answer your question, I could take a look in some
Arabic Levantine nom. loc. etymologies book in Leiden University library, if
you'd like me to. The kind of book that weighs 8 kilos and that needs its
own shelve.

best regards,
Herman, Rotterdam