Aramaic

The evidence for a history of Mandaeism during the period of Late Antiquity (3rd–8th c. CE) and its evolution as a religious tradition prior to and immediately following the advent of Islam is surveyed. This evidence includes the Mandaean manuscript tradition, the testimony of outside witnesses, and the corpus of incantation texts from Late Antique Mesopotamia. It is noted that the study of this evidence has typically been subsumed under the study of related traditions, and that it could benefit from a reassessment. The issues addressed include Mandaeism’s relationship to other religions, such as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Manichaeism, the antiquity and authenticity of its traditions, and the extent of Islamic influence upon them.

The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies is the first ever complete translation into a modern language of this important historical document relating to the origins of Judaism and Christianity. Found within the pages of the world’s oldest-dated manuscript, in any language, The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies tells the first-century story of a young Roman philosopher, Clement. Leaving his native land, Clement travels to the Middle East to meet the Apostles and records details of the original teachings of Jesus’ earliest followers. Clement also relays the travels of the Apostle Peter in his attempt to stop a false version of Christianity from being spread throughout the Roman Empire by an insidious deceiver. The narrative concludes with an amazing life story retold by the author. This astonishing document, having been suppressed for nearly two millennia, contains revelations about the formative years leading up to the split between Jews and Christians, and has the potential to revolutionize modern understandings of religion and philosophy. The text is written in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and his Apostles. The Clementine Recognitions and Homilies has previously only been available through altered Greek and Latin recensions and has become a topic of great controversy among Biblical scholars for the past five centuries. Now, for the first time, the oldest form of the text is made accessible to the public in a complete English translation.

GEBHARDT, JOSEPH GLEN (2014). The Syriac Clementine Recognitions and Homilies: The First Complete Translation of the Text. Nashville, TN: Grave Distractions Publications. 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-9908685-3-8.

The research presented here examines two features of word order in the Aramaic and Hebrew documents from the Judean desert refuge caves: (a) subject-predicate > predicate-subject order (in verbal clauses); and (b) predicate (or infinitive)-complement order. It appears that the word order in the legal documents – both Aramaic and Hebrew – resembles the order in the eastern type of Official Aramaic, as described by E. Y. Kutscher: (a) the verb can either precede or follow the subject; (b) the predicate (or infinitive) can precede or follow its complements. The letters, however, show the “western” word order, the one accepted as the usual word order in Semitic languages, as represented in the western type of Official Aramaic, as well as in Old Aramaic, classical biblical Hebrew, and rabbinic Hebrew: (a) the verb precedes the subject; and (b) the predicate or infinitive precedes its complements. Namely, the legal documents follow an (eastern) legal tradition, and therefore do not reflect the word order of their scribes’ native tongue (Aramaic or Hebrew). The letters, on the other hand, are not bound to old traditions, and therefore reflect, to some extent, the natural languages of Judea between the first and the second revolts.

L’invenzione del dialogo raccoglie una serie di testi letterari cristiani in lingua siriaca, di un genere in cui questa letteratura si distinse ed eccelse: l’innografia e la poesia piegate a esporre temi e motivi teologici, esegetici e sapienziali. Gli scritti debitamente introdotti e commentati mostrano la varietà di forme e contenuti che questi conobbero: dalla riflessione filosofica e teologica di Efrem, al ricamo narrativo ed esegetico di dialoghi immaginari tra personaggi della Bibbia o dell’agiografia, da Caino e Abele o Giuseppe e la moglie di Potifar, a Giuseppe e Maria o la peccatrice e Satana, fino ai contraddittori che in età cristiana riprendono e reinventano un genere mesopotamico antico: quello della disputa, ad esempio tra anima e corpo, tra i mesi, tra l’oro e il grano.

Indice e preview: https://www.claudiana.it/scheda-libro/alessandro-mengozzi/linvenzione-del-dialogo-9788839409577-2152.html

The study of the Samaritan version of Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Pentateuch (the tafsīr), mainly based on MS London BL OR7562, shows that a Saadyan version in Arabic Characters was adopted by the Samaritans and adapted to the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch. The transmission of this version in MS London BL OR7562 continued after the early Samaritan Arabic translation of the Pentateuch and perhaps also its later revision had already been created, since many of their translations were preserved in MS BL OR7562, mixed with its Saadyan basic text. As MS London BL OR7562 also contains numerous words and phrases paralleled only in Christian Arabic translations of the Pentateuch and Saadyan adaptations, mainly related to the Peshitta tradition, it is reasonable to assume that these were the sources of this Samaritan Saadyan version and possibly also of the other Samaritan Arabic translations. The Samaritan version of Saadya’s translation of the Pentateuch also reveals some parallels to tenth- and eleventh-century Karaite translations and it contains prominent Aramaic and Islamic vocabulary, unfamiliar in other versions of Saadya’s tafsīr.

Rad se bavi rečima stranog porekla u klasičnom arapskom jeziku, koji se koristio pre pojave islama i u prvim vekovima po njegovom nastanku, a koji je intenzivno preuzimao reči iz persijskog, grčkog, sirskog, latinskog, hebrejskog i drugih jezika. Predstavljen je istorijski okvir u kom je dolazilo do jezičkih kontakata i navedeno 100 reči stranog porekla koje su ušle u klasični arapski jezik, razvrstanih prema etimološkom kriterijumu, uzimajući u obzir i intenzitet uticaja koji su pomenuti jezici izvršili na klasični arapski. Navedeni su prevodni ekvivalenti svake reči, i to na osnovu Arapsko-bosanskog rječnika Teufika Muftića (u prva dva izdanja: Arapsko-srpskohrvatski rječnik), pri čemu je identifikovano više reči stranog porekla koje se javljaju u oba jezika. Analizirali smo i druge podatke koje Muftićev Rječnik nudi u vezi sa pomenutim rečima stranog porekla – grafološke varijacije, morfološke odlike osnovnih oblika i množina izvedenih iz njih, kao i semantičke specifičnosti.
Ključne reči: reči stranog porekla, jezičko pozajmljivanje, adaptacija pozajmljenica, klasični arapski jezik, Arapsko-bosanski rječnik, Teufik Muftić.

This is an attempt to reconsider some issues that challenge the reconstruction of the Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic fragments of "the Book of Giants", while drawing on codicological considerations to locate the main cluster of reconstructed fragments of 4Q530 within that manuscript.

The Lake Urmia region in northwest Iran is one often overlooked not only in terms of Syriac studies, but also when it comes to Eastern Christianity and especially art and architecture — not the least because many western scholars have found the area to be inaccessible.

Prior to the First World War this region was an Assyrian Christian cultural centre and, especially from the 1830s onwards, it witnessed an unprecedented renaissance in terms of original cultural and literary output. Indeed, the Urmia region stands out as one where the Assyrians were sufficiently numerous and well off enough to develop excellent skills as stonecutters, copyists, and builders — especially from the sixteenth century onwards.

A common generalisation has been that the Assyrians of Urmia, being for the most part rural agriculturalists and members of the largely aniconic Church of the East, were thus devoid of any serious kind of artistic expression. Despite this misconception, evidence does exist in the form of tombstone art, manuscript miniatures and architecture, whether religious or domestic, all of which may be seen as forms of visual expression comparable to that of their neighbours. Although much of the older material has not survived due to constant wars, pogroms and conflict in the area, enough still remains to warrant serious study. This is important in reconstructing a yet poorly documented and little-studied part of Middle Eastern art history.

Diese ungewöhnliche Zauberschale mit einem hekhalotischen Einschub in aramäisch ist mir in einer deutschen Privatsammlung aufgefallen. Sie wurde bereits in der Sektion für Judaistik des XXVIII. Deutschen Orientalistentages in Bamberg 2001 vorgestellt. Die Keramikschale weist den gängigen Typ mit den folgenden Maßen ø 15,8 x h 6,5 cm auf und verfügt über keine Standfläche. Sie ist von der inneren Bodenmitte bis zur Hälfte in einer spiralförmig verlaufenden zierlichen Quadratschrift1 beschrieben und wird von einem Kreis abgeschlossen, an die sich eine Kartusche mit Text anschließt. Die Schrift ist zum Teil auf einem Drittel stark verblaßt und die innere Mitte wird durch eine Verkrustung überdeckt, so daß der Textanfang nicht auszumachen ist. Der Text selber besteht aus gängigen Beschwörungsformeln mit Nennung des Klientennamen mit einem aramäischen hekhalotisch Einschub, der mit der mehrfach wiederholten Abkürzung des Tetragrammatons (24 x) und dem Schma‘ Israel abgeschlossen wird, gefolgt von der Auflistung der vier Erzengel in der Kartusche

The present article deals with the comparative method as applied to the Semitic cognate sets with phonological correspondences. It demonstrates how one with help of comparative Semitic approach and certain principles of analysis can establish a Proto-phoneme, how to reconstruct it and how to distinguish between true cognates and borrowed ones, illustrated through a set of case studies within the framework of phonological correspondences. For this task, historical linguistics prefer cognates from basic vocabulary (body parts, close kinship terms, and the like), since such terms are considered to resist borrowing more than other sorts of vocabulary. Applying this to the Semitic languages and looking for potential Semitic true cognates I have chosen cognate sets denoting body parts as the basic illustrative examples for my investigation, which in the course of discussion is widened to
include other illustrative examples.

A complete edition of all known Latino (and Graeco)-Punic inscriptions along with a detailed, comparative grammatical analysis, esp. with regard to phonology and orthographic practice. Several texts are presented here for the first time. These texts from Roman-era Tripolitania (the first centuries A.D.) render Punic systematically, although written with Latin graphemes. Until now they have been largely neglected by Semiticists. They thus provide, among other things, fully vocalised material, unusual for alphabetically written Semitic languages, which can provide us with insight into the historical and diachronic development of the (North-West) Semitic languages, esp. biblical Hebrew. At the same time, these texts are also interesting epigraphic texts documenting the spread of the Punic language into the African interior.

from the 2010 conference, to be published in in ‘And God Breathed into Man the Breath of Life’ – Dust of the Ground and Breath of Life (Gen 2.7): The Development of a Dualistic Anthropology in Early Judaism and Christianity, and Their Umwelts (ed. J.T.A.G.M. van Ruiten and G.H. van Kooten; Themes in Biblical Narrative; Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

The article discusses how eastern chronological benchmarks can contribute to the absolute chronology of archaic Scythia. Given the dates of the fall of Urartu (ca. 640 BC) and the Rysaikino inscription (the late 8th century BC), the early Scythian chronology shows up as follows: the Scythians appeared in the North Caucasus as early as in the mid-8th century BC; they invaded Transcaucasia and the north-western Iran in the late 8th century BC; articles executed in the Scythian animal style and weapons from the destroyed centres of Urartu should be dated to the mid-7th century BC at the latest.

It has always been thought that John 1:42 includes a statement by Jesus in which he renames Simon with the Aramaic word meaning "rock", after which a scribe parenthetically explains this word in Greek. This brief essay argues that what Jesus actually said includes the presumed parenthetical explanation as well, and that it is an intricate set of doubles entendres.

This study will consider the materiality of the Jedaniah collection from Elephantine through the lenses of process theory of identity and temporal-spatial discourse. The Jedaniah collection is composed of ten Aramaic documents, spanning at least twenty years in the mid-fifth century BCE. The documents include copies of letters sent and received by members inside of the "Jewish" community as well as Persian-backed authority figures. Since these texts were discovered in 1907, many scholars have discussed their content in relation to their "Jewish" themes, but few have questioned the theoretical frameworks employed for examining the material nature of the documents. A methodological framework will be presented that sets process theory of identity in conversation with Thomas Tweed's temporal-spatial theory. Process theory of identity has developed in the context of post-colonial discourse in order to explore how colonialized communities construct hybrid, dynamic identities in response to the internalized experience of colonialization. The works of Jon L. Berquist, Christiane Karrer-Grube, and Katherine E. Southwood, in particular, suggest that both the rule of the Persian Empire over the community at Elephantine and the broader inter-cultural interactions in this sub-province of the Persian Empire should be examined through a lens that accounts for the dynamics of imperial power and the hybridity of process identity common to colonized communities. Moreover, it is appropriate to consider temporal-spatial movement in the Persian Empire as it is reflected and developed through the material artifacts of the Aramaic missives in the Jedaniah collection, since a missive by nature is a temporally-delayed text sent between geographically separated communities. The result of this missive communication is an imperially-structured distal community discourse, which develops over time in a network of spatially removed community nodes and authorities. Tweed's analysis of space as differentiated, kinetic, interrelated, generated, and generative is used in this study as a productive means of analyzing these Aramaic letters as texts that actively construct the identity of this colonized group across space and time. In addition, analysis in light of process theory of identity and temporal-spatial theory will shed light on the challenges of this community's debated "Jewish" identity. As a conquered province within the Achaemenid empire, the population of Yev (‫,יב‬ that is, Elephantine), and its subgroups are an ancient context ripe with characteristics in common with modern day displaced and colonized communities. Having been dispossessed of their lands and political autonomy, the inhabitants of Yev exhibit the hybridity of their colonial identities through their intertwined relationships with the Persian authorities and one another. The missives central to this study, the Jedaniah letters (5 th c. BCE), are a fruitful source of data for the process of identity formation, since they themselves both record and advance an inter-group conflict on the island of Yev. 1 The letters in this collection originated over the course of at least twenty years on Elephantine Island, from 419 to post-407 BCE. The majority of them are addressed to or mention an individual named Jedaniah bar Gemariah, a leader in the community. 2 The content of the letters 1 This collection is composed of 10 documents, including copies of letters sent to Yev and letters received at Yev from other locations, referenced in The Textbook of Aramaic Documents as A4.1-A4.10 (Porten, Bezalel, and Yardeni, Ada, eds, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt (Magnes, 1986)). 2 P. Grelot, 'Études sur le 'Papyrus Pascal' d'Elephantine', Vetus Testamentum, 4 (1954), 349-384.

This is the first study to compare the allusions to scribal culture found in the Aramaic Story of Ahiqar and the Hebrew Tale of Jeremiah and Baruch’s Scroll in Jeremiah 36. It is shown that disguised in the royal propagandistic message of Ahiqar is a sophisticated Aramaic critique on the social practices of Akkadian scribal culture. Jeremiah 36, however, uses loci of scribal activity as well as allusions to scribal interactions and the techniques of the scribal craft to construct a subversive tale. When studied from a comparative perspective it is argued that the Story of Ahiqar, which has long been associated with the well-known court tale genre, is an example of a subgenre which is here called the scribal conflict narrative, and Jeremiah 36 is found to be a second example of or a response to it. This observation is arrived at by means of rigorous manuscript examination combined with narrative analysis, which identified, among other things, the development of autobiographical and biographical styles of the same ancient narrative. This study not only provides new perspectives on scribal culture, Ahiqar studies, and Jeremiah studies, but it may have far reaching implications for other ancient sources.

For Jacob of Serugh’s large text corpus hardly any early text or primary witnesses have survived. Most of them are copies from centuries later, with the most ancient ones dating to the seventh century AD. The discovery of a sixth-century palimpsest (6th cent.) with the Homily on the Presentation in the Temple by this prolific author among the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library from Deir al-Suryan is rather surprising after so many years since the publication of the catalogues by William Wright in 1871–1873. This study presents the attribution of the palimpsest folios according to their content.

These are second proofs, with minor differences to the published version.
This essay, delivered as a preliminary paper in Helsinki, was completed while three
articles, organized in a specific series on the topic of ethnicity in the Neo-Assyrian
empire through the lens of the nisbe, were in course of publication: Fales 2013, Fales
2015, and Fales 2017. It may thus be read as explicitly presenting a bird’s-eye view of
the results given in much greater detail therein, although it also offers a number of new
additions in the footnotes and the bibliography.

Nobody has come up with a convincing explanation of who the Nicolaitans are by looking only at the Greek text. A glance at the Aramaic, however, and it becomes clear who they are. The same is true of the Synagogue of Satan, the Throne of Satan, Balaam, and Jezebel.

"Sargon Donabed provides a comprehensive overview of the modern Assyrian story, merging emic and etic perspectives of their struggle to attain sovereignty over the past century and beyond. His work offers both an informative source for Assyrian ethnic history and an alternative reading for Mesopotamian regional history as a whole." -- Nabil Al-Tikriti, University of Mary Washington

"In telling the story of modern Assyrian responses to a history of tragedy, Sargon Donabed helps us understand them as actors in their own right. He thereby rewrites Iraqi history from the perspective of the oppressed. No longer may we ignore the plight of this misunderstood minority." -- Paul S. Rowe, Trinity Western University