Language Contact in Judea: How Much Aramaic is There in the Hebrew Documents from the Judean Desert?

Hebrew was spoken alongside Aramaic during the days of the Second Temple, and ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the third century C.E. Its status in the period between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt is a different matter, which can be solved with the aid of the Hebrew documents from the Judean Desert—mostly military letters and legal documents. A detailed philological investigation and a socio-linguistic inspection of this corpus reveal that it represents a living spoken Hebrew dialect, very close to Rabbinic Hebrew. Even though it was shadowed and influenced by Aramaic, it maintained its Hebrew character, both in speech and in writing.