Book excerpt: This volume explores the language and poetic structure of the seven non-Masoretic poems preserved in the Dead Sea Scroll labeled 11Q5 or 11QPsa. It presents fresh readings of the Hebrew poems, which were last studied intensively almost fifty years ago, stressing their structural and conceptual coherence and incorporating insights gained from the scholarship of recent decades. Each chapter addresses a single poem and describes its poetic structure, including its use of parallelism and allusion to scripture, as well as specific problems related to the poem's interpretation. In addition, the book considers these poems in relation to what they reveal about the development of Hebrew poetry in the late Second Temple period.