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Record W4415134687 · doi:10.1163/15685179-bja10073

Was There Universal Education of Girls and Boys in the Qumran Communities?

2025· article· en· W4415134687 on OpenAlexaff
John W. Martens

Bibliographic record

VenueDead Sea Discoveries · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMiddle East and Rwanda Conflicts
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDead Sea ScrollsContext (archaeology)MemorizationReading (process)Perspective (graphical)LiteracyJewish studiesJudaismOrder (exchange)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract While several scholars have suggested that there was a universal education for boys and girls in the Qumran communities based on 1QSa 1:4–8, 4Q266 9 iii 6–9/ CD 13:17–20, and CD 15:5–15, there are a few necessary questions that must be asked before one can affirm such a reality. What is meant by “education” in these passages? We need to evaluate precisely what we mean by education in order to be clear what we mean by universal. Does universal education indicate simply oral recitation and memorization of the community laws, or does it mean an education that included reading and writing, or, perhaps, even training in the elite profession of a scribe? A comparison with data from other parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls ( DSS ), as well as a childist perspective on Jewish and Greco-Roman society regarding the formation of children, can help us clarify the questions, even if they cannot be answered definitively. A literate education, let alone a scribal education, was reserved for few people in antiquity. The majority of boys and girls received education in agriculture, trades, crafts, and in the domestic sphere. Moreover, girls rarely received formal education and often married at puberty. When we consider the possibility of universal education, though, we must consider the sectarian context of the DSS since the increased need for members of these communities to follow the laws of the community perfectly might have led to greater literacy and formal scribal training, perhaps even for girls.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.768
Threshold uncertainty score0.989

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.296
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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