Antedating of Qumran and etymology bibliography

[Stephen Goranson]

OED has 1954. Qumran is the Arabic name of the wadi (usually-dry riverbed) and
the khirbeh (ruin; construct form, Khirbet Qumran) of an ancient settlement
surrounded by eleven caves in which were found the Dead Sea Scrolls, that
evidently once belonged to Essenes who lived there for much of the first
centuries BCE/BC and CE/AD.

Joan E. Taylor's fine article, "Khirbet Qumran in the Nineteenth Century and the
Name of the Site," Palestine Exploration Quarterly 134 (2002) 144-64 surveys
accounts of visitors and explores the origin of the name. There's no consensus
on what it means (grey, moon, priests, belt?). To her good bibliography can be
added S. Bowman, "The Meaning of the Name 'Qumran,'" Revue de Qumran t. 11 n.44
(1984) 543-7.

By the way, does anyone know the publisher for Anatoly Liberman's Etymology
Bibliography?

Taylor, p. 159: "To summarize, in terms of the name of the site, the
nineteenth-century travellers render the name in various different ways:
Goumran/Oumran (de Saulcy 1851; Isaacs 1856; Clermont-Ganneau 1874), Gumran
(Finn 1856; Drake 1874; Conder 1874), Ghomran (Poole 1856; Van der Velde 1858);
Ghoumran (Rey 1859)."

To this we can add that various French writers, e.g. E.-M. Lapperousaz, spell it
Qoumran (Qoumrân, l'établissement essénien des bords de la mer Morte :
histoire et archéologie du site, 1976).

Kumran is also found, e.g. in Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land
By George Adam Smith (1915) p.69 (Google Books).

For a pre-1954 use with the spelling Qumran (via JSTOR): "Now there is a small
ancient site called Khirbet Qumran [macron a], situated at a distance 1 km
south of the Cave."  Paul Kahle "The Age of the Scrolls," Vetus Testamentum 1.1
(Jan. 1951) p.41.


Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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