The End of Desire: On the Meaning of תשוקה in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the long-standing tradition of translating תשׁוקה as “desire” in its three biblical occurrences (Gen 3:16; 4:7; Cant 7:11 [Eng. 10]), recent studies have put forth alternatives such as “turning, return,” “preoccupation, devotion” and “driving.” This essay examines these possibilities in light of the usage of תשׁוקה in the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QM 13:12; 15:10; 17:4; 1QS 11:22; 4QInstrb 2:4). The meaning “desire” is shown to be particularly problematic, not only as a result of its absence in the earliest biblical versions, but also due to the expression לעפר תשׁוקתו immediately after a depiction of mankind being created from dust (עפר) in 1QS 11. The standard translation, “for dust is [mankind’s] desire,” appears incongruous, and parallels in Hodayot reinforce the likelihood that a “return” to dust is in view. The meanings “preoccupation, devotion” and “driving” also lack plausibility in 1QS 11, and “turning, return” proves problematic in 1QM 13 and 15. It is suggested the semantic range of תשׁוקה includes both “a focused movement toward” and “a focused movement back toward.” As such, it denotes “preoccupation, devotion” in most of its occurrences, yet indicates “return” in 1QS 11, and possibly Gen 3:16.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it