The Orion Center joined forces with the Hebrew University's Eliezer Ben-Yehuda Center for the Study of the History of the Hebrew Language to hold the 12th International Orion Symposium, "Hebrew in the Second Temple Period: The Language of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of Other Contemporary Sources." This symposium was also the fifth in a series of scholarly meetings on the Hebrew of the Scrolls initiated by Takemitsu Muraoka. Previous gatherings have taken place in Leiden (1995 and 1997), Beer Sheva (1999), and Strasbourg (2006).
The symposium brought together senior and junior scholars from Israel and abroad who research different aspects of the Hebrew language traditions that existed during the Second Temple Period. All the participants dealt with at least one of the following corpora: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Ben Sira, Tannaitic Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew, and the Hebrew reflected in Greek transcriptions. Paper topics ranged from grammatical and syntactic issues to studies on the vocabulary of Qumranic and related documents, including the recently published Vision of Gabriel.