Aramaic Studies

Although the Aramaic of Daniel is a rather small corpus, it is an important object of research, because most scholars locate it at the crossroads between two major periods of Aramaic, ie, Imperial Aramaic, when Aramaic served as the international language of the ...

This article exatnines the references to Messiah bar Ephraitn in the Targums, and coticludes that the Targumic Tosefta to Zech. 12.10, where Messiah bar Ephraim is vanquished, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Exod. 40.9-11, where he is the vanquisher, both predate the Christian period. The apparent conflict between his suffering and conquering roles may indicate a belief that bar Ephraim's death effects the final redemption. References in the Targum to the Song of Songs are also considered.

This article introduces a new research project focusing on the Aramaic language of the Zohar-the most influential work in the literary canon of the Jewish mystical tradition. The Zohar is generally assumed by scholars to have been written in Spain during the final decades of the thirteenth century, although traditional kabbalists and Orthodox Jews believe that it was authored by its main protagonist, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, in second-century Palestine. While not disputing the late medieval provenance of the work, this article challenges the standard scholarly opinion whereby the Aramaic in which it was written was an artificially manufactured idiom, drawing its vocabulary, grammar and syntax indiscriminately from a variety of 'genuine' Aramaic sources. Part I of this study demonstrates that some of the most distinctive 'flaws' of zoharic Aramaic are attested in a wide range of much earlier Aramaic sources. Part II, which will be published separately, as a sequel, concerns the related question of the Palestinian setting of the Zohar.

Page 1. [AS 2.1 (2004) 63-84] ISSN 1477-8351 The Relationship of Aquila and Theodotion to the Old Greek of Ecclesiastes in the Marginal Notes of the Syro-Hexapla ∗ Peter J. Gentry The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY History of Past Research ...

The eighth century is the latest many scholars feel comfortable with for the use of Aramaic as a living language, before it was supplanted by Arabic. Therefore, clearly late Targums were usually dated circa the eighth century. However, persuasive arguments have been made in the past generation for a later dating regarding some Targums. This justifies a re-evaluation of the assumption that an Aramaic speaking environment is necessary for the continued composition of Targums. This article offers a possible Sitz im Leben for Targum composition after the decline of Aramaic as a spoken language throughout most of the Jewish world.

... 159 The following analysis is based entirely upon my own inductive study.27 As Rahlfs took the Bible Commentary of Jerome's Commen-tary to be equivalent to the Old Latin and sometimes based his text upon it against the Greek manuscript tradition, the critical text I have ...

Though the social and geographic milieu of the Genesis Apocryphon has regularly been considered to be Greco-Roman period Palestine, there are several indications that the author(s) of this text had a special knowledge of, and interest in, Egypt. This essay explores three possible connections with Egypt: use of the name Hyrcanus for the Pharaoh's official, employment of the name Karmon for the river separating Canaan and Egypt, and the practice of sibling marriage for Shem's children only after the flood. Taken cumulatively, these factors speak to a general familiarity of the author(s) with Egypt, plausibly during the Ptolemaic period, though an Egyptian compositional setting is far less certain.

The fourth century Syriac church father Aphrahat cites Jer. 31.31–32 in his Demonstrations. His citation is remarkable since it differs dramatically from the text of the OT Peshitta. This essay analyzes the citation and presents a solution. What looks at first blush like a citation of the Peshitta OT is in reality a blending of the Syriac NT citation of the OT and the OT Peshitta text. His use of Gen. 15.6 corroborates this method of OT citation.

In a box of unpublished Aramaic papyri from the 1906–1907 German excavations of Elephantine there is a small fragment (p. 23141) that uses scribal marks in a margin or vacat to identify a textual edit. This is the first example of Aramaic editorial marks of this type from the Persian period, and demonstrates a previously unidentified scribal practice.

This article examines the lexical class of interjections in Biblical Aramaic through the framework of an interjectional prototype and its functional (semantic and pragmatic) and formal (phonetic, morphological, and syntactic) characteristics. The authors analyse eight interjectional lexemes or constructional patterns, attested in twenty-four uses, for their compliance to the canonical prototype. The evidence reveals significant variation in the interjections’ canonicity: high canonicity in primary interjections, semi-canonicity in nearly primary interjections, and low canonicity in secondary interjections.

The twentieth-century’s Targum manuscript discoveries made clear that if Neofiti, the Fragment Targums, and the Cairo Geniza fragments were composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, then Targum Pseudo-Jonathan was not. In this classic essay, originally written in Hebrew in 1985–1986 and translated here for the first time, Stephen Kaufman worked to describe Pseudo-Jonathan’s dialect. He found that it borrowed from other dialects, but merged them into a single unified dialect appearing not only in Pseudo-Jonathan, but also in several Writings Targums. This essay thus presented the earliest description of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.

Astrology is often depicted as antagonistic towards official religion. However, we find indications hidden in the technical texts themselves that seem to reveal the contrary. This article will concentrate on Aramaic astrology and divination and try to unfold formulas and practices that are typical for this and neighboring genres. These stylistic devices will moreover be identified as rhetorical strategies employed as a type of propaganda.

The Syriac version of 1 Macc. that is preserved in Codex Ambrosianus (7a1) is very different from the one attested in the rest of the manuscripts of the Peshitta. This double attestation is typically explained by a hypothesis first put forward by G. Schmidt in 1897 that sees the version of 7a1 (Syr-2) as a revision of the original Syriac translation (Syr-1), which is the one attested in the majority of the manuscripts. This article aims to challenge this theory. In fact, this study shows that there is no relationship between Syr-1 and Syr-2, that is, Syr-2 cannot be considered a revision of Syr-1 (intended to eliminate additions), but must be understood as a new translation made from the Greek. For its part, Syr-1 is characterised by a number of double readings that could be interpreted as the work of an editor who preserves readings from two different Syriac versions of 1 Macc.

At the end of the nineteenth century Alfred Rahlfs stated that the manuscripts of the Old Testament Peshitta were clearly divided into two families according to confessional criteria (following the schism between the Eastern and Western Syriac Churches). As a consequence, no critical edition could be done. One century later Piet B. Dirksen cast doubt on the classical theory saying that the schism had been of no consequence for the transmission of the text. But there was one exception: the book of Psalms, on which the old paradigm would continue to weigh. This article challenges the statement on the role of the Psalter.

Although abandoned as vernacular, Aramaic was not completely disregarded by Samaritan writers during the first centuries of Muslim rule in Palestine. Their literary product, poor in style and thematic when compared with the compositions of the Byzantine period, is written in what we may designate as 'Late Samaritan Aramaic'. Leaning on literary patterns borrowed from ancient poetry it is a kind of conventional Aramaic, marked by a rather limited respect for grammatical rules, with heavy traces of Hebrew and, at times, Arabic. In this it resembles the language dominant in Jewish contemporary Aramaic liturgy (except Arabic influence), which also characterizes Zoharic Aramaic.

The twentieth-century’s Targum manuscript discoveries made clear that if Neofiti, the Fragment Targums, and the Cairo Geniza fragments were composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, then Targum Pseudo-Jonathan was not. In this classic essay, originally written in Hebrew in 1985–1986 and translated here for the first time, Stephen Kaufman worked to describe Pseudo-Jonathan’s dialect. He found that it borrowed from other dialects, but merged them into a single unified dialect appearing not only in Pseudo-Jonathan, but also in several Writings Targums. This essay thus presented the earliest description of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.

In the Aramaic of Daniel, the imperfect expresses past situations 29 times. Scholars have long wrestled with these past time uses, and although important contributions have been made along the way, one of the most salient semantic issues that arise with these uses—the semantic intersection of imperfective aspect and telicity—has been overlooked. This study addresses this issue directly by providing a linguistic analysis of the past imperfective uses of the imperfect that describes their semantics in light of situation aspect and (un)boundedness. This study also describes the past modal use of the imperfect, and offers a linguistic explanation for how the imperfect acquired such a use. Ultimately, this study provides a linguistic analysis of the past time uses of the imperfect that fosters more artful and nuanced readings of the text in light of its semantic and functional sophistication.

Sentence-punctuation in manuscripts of the Syriac Peshitta Bible is not well understood. One punctuation mark, however, a vertical pair of points above a letter, known as zawgā ʿelāyā, can be made out with some confidence: it marks yes-or-no questions. This conclusion is demonstrated from a sampling of early New Testament manuscripts in the British Library. The evidence of these manuscripts is all the more valuable because native Syriac grammarians generally lost the key to the meaning of this and other punctuation marks. It is conjectured that Syriac was the first language to use a reading sign as a question mark.

‭This study attempts to disambiguate the various subdialect groups within the corpus of late Targum and Targum-like texts grouped together under the rubric of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic (LJLA) in the database of the online Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project. The relationship with the Syriac lexicon was tested separately for each text in the group. The result shows five distinct groups within the larger corpus ranging from texts ‘translated’ from Syriac to texts showing little contact at all with native Aramaic traditions. A particularly surprising result was that Targum Sheni appears to belong to the core group of LJLA texts.‬

In the present article we aim to describe the distribution and functions of preposed and postposed paronomastic infinitives in literary and spoken varieties of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA). In the first part, the syntax and the function(s) of constructions involving a paronomastic infinitive will be described from a typological point of view. Syntactic and functional variation of NENA paronomastic infinitives largely corresponds to what is found in other Semitic languages, as well as in many languages belonging to other families. In the second part of the article we will address the rendering of Biblical Hebrew and Classical Syriac paronomastic infinitives in NENA Bible translations and offer a survey of various constructions found in spoken varieties and in the language of early Christian Neo-Aramaic poetry.

Earlier scholars concluded correctly that the Peshitta of Daniel was translated from a Semitic prototext, but their arguments were less than compelling. Basing the argument on vocabulary, to wit the consistent rendering of Hebrew יְהוּדָה as ܝܗܘܕܐ and Aramaic יְהוּד as ܝܗܘܕ, the use of Persian loanwords, and the preservation of a rare Semitic adverb, provides a more convincing case than offered in the past. Though not necessary to prove the point, the author suggests that what could be interpreted as a peal passive participle may in fact be an internal peal passive suffix conjugation form. This suggestion is presented for scholarly consideration and should not be considered fundamental to the major thesis.

Although folk etymology is a common linguistic phenomenon, it has hitherto hardly been touched upon in lexicological and other works related to varieties of Neo-Aramaic. The present article concerns twelve cases of folk etymology selected from some of the dialects of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), the largest and most variegated division of modern Aramaic. Among these are three folk-etymological interpretations that did not induce structural or other changes, as well as nine cases of folk-etymological processes that reshaped NENA lexical items.

Although abandoned as vernacular, Aramaic was not completely disregarded by Samaritan writers during the first centuries of Muslim rule in Palestine. Their literary product, poor in style and thematic when compared with the compositions of the Byzantine period, is written in what we may designate as 'Late Samaritan Aramaic'. Leaning on literary patterns borrowed from ancient poetry it is a kind of conventional Aramaic, marked by a rather limited respect for grammatical rules, with heavy traces of Hebrew and, at times, Arabic. In this it resembles the language dominant in Jewish contemporary Aramaic liturgy (except Arabic influence), which also characterizes Zoharic Aramaic.

The biblical book of Daniel tells its readers about the life and visions of Daniel, a Judean courtier and visionary, and of three friends of his during various short periods in the reigns of the Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar (in about 605-603 BCE, maybe also a little later) ...