The End of Desire: On the Meaning of תשוקה in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls

What it is about

תְּשׁוּקָה occurs three times in the Bible (Gen 3:16, 4:7, Song 7:11) and is traditionally translated "desire", but the earliest versions do not render it so (the Septuagint has "turning, return"), and recent proposals include "return", "preoccupation, devoted attention" and "driving" (DCH's homonym). The author tests the four candidates against the word's uses in the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QM 13:12, 15:10, 17:4; 1QS 11:22; 4QInstruction). "Desire" fits badly, especially in 1QS 11, where "to dust is its תשוקה" follows man's creation from dust and means a return to dust; "return" itself fails in 1QM 13 and 15; "driving" fails in 1QS. He concludes that the word means "preoccupation, devoted attention", extended to "a focused movement toward", with the sense of return supplied by context where it appears.

Ideas

• I1. A "disputed sense" field in the Torah dictionary: for words like תְּשׁוּקָה, keep BDB's gloss but list the alternatives with their sources (ancient versions, later uses, modern proposals), so the dictionary never presents a contested gloss as settled.
• I2. Rare lemmas (three uses or fewer in the Bible) carry glosses that rest mostly on tradition; count them in the Torah and mark them, so a low-evidence sense is visible in explain output.
• I3. Evidence from later Hebrew (Qumran, Mishnah) and the ancient versions as a sense test: for a rare word, a gloss that fits the Torah but fails every later use is weak. A short method note for the lexicon chapter.

For Mova

I1 and I2 go into macula dict (new columns: alternatives with source, a low-frequency flag) and The lexicon (polysemy, rare words). I3 is a method paragraph in 10-lexicon.md and links to 11-mishnaic.md. The Gen 3:16 and 4:7 readings are a worked example where interpretive disagreement should be kept, not resolved.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5508/jhs29657

@article{condren2024end,
  title = {{The End of Desire: On the Meaning of תשוקה in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls}},
  author = {Condren, Janson},
  journal = {Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 24},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.5508/jhs29657},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs29657}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo-2024-condren-end-desire-meaning-hebrew-scriptures/