Exodus in Syriac

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Exodus in Syriac

Jerome A. Lund

Three translations of the Book of Exodus into Syriac are known: the Peshitta,1 the translation of Paul of Tella termed by present-day scholars the Syrohexa- pla,2 and the translation of Jacob of Edessa.3 The Peshitta translates a Hebrew text that is situated in the proto-Masoretic textual stream. By contrast, Paul of Tella rendered the Greek text into Syriac to give Syrian church leaders and scholars a means of approaching the Greek for comparative purposes. He incor- porated hexaplaric annotations into the text and marginal notes, so that his translation constitutes a valuable witness not only to the Old Greek translation, but also to the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachos, and Theodotion. Jacob of Edessa utilized the Peshitta as his base text, while incorporating elements of the Greek Bible both through direct translation and from the Syrohexapla.4 From his study of Isaiah, Andreas Juckel has suggested that Jacob of Edessa sought “to adjust the Peshitta to the Greek as much as necessary, and to adopt the

1 Marinus D. Koster prepared the book of Exodus for the Leiden scientific edition of the Peshitta, The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Peshitta Version—Part i, 1. Preface, Genesis—Exodus (Leiden: Brill, 1977). The earliest attestation of the term “Peshitta” ( =I%"Kܐ ; “simple,” “straightforward”) comes from the ninth century theologian Moshe bar Kepha. The term was used to distinguish the earlier translations of the Bible from the seventh century translations (Sebastian P. Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition [gh 7; rev. ed.; Piscataway; Gorgias, 2006], 23; for alternative views see Piet B. Dirksen, “The Old Testament Peshitta,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity [ed. Martin Jan Mulder; crint 2/1; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1988], 255–256). 2 Two mss of the Syrohexapla to Exodus are extant: British Library Add 14429, dating from 697 according to William Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, acquired since the year 1838, Part i, entry xlix (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1870; repr., Piscataway: Gorgias, 2002), and published by Paul de Lagarde in his Bibliothecae Syriacae (Göttingen: Dietrich Lueder Horstmann, 1892), and a Midyat ms published by Arthur Vööbus in his The Pentateuch in the Version of the Syro-Hexapla: A Facsimile Edition of a Midyat ms Discovered 1964 (csco 369, Subsidia 45; Leuven: Peeters, 1975). Whereas the British Museum ms is complete, the Midyat ms lacks texts on folios 42 and 51, that is, Exod 22:29b–23:26a and 29:41–30:18a. 3 ms Bibliothèque Nationale syr. 26, Paris, contains Jacob of Edessa’s translation of the Book of Exodus. 4 Alison Salvesen, “Jacob of Edessa’s version of Exodus 1 and 28,” Hugoye 8.1 (2005) [http:// bethmardutho.org/index.php/hugoye/volume-index.html], §18.

(unrevised) Peshitta as much as possible.”5 In addition to substitutions, Jacob of Edessa used doublets and expansions to supplement the Peshitta. With regard to the Peshitta, Jews rendered the Book of Exodus from Hebrew into Syriac about 150ce in the environs of Edessa,6 though Christians preserved the translation as their own. Michael Weitzman has argued that the same community that translated the text preserved the text, moving from being adherents to a form of Judaism to being Christians.7 Inasmuch as Tatian quotes the Peshitta Old Testament in his Diatessaron, the text must have been in use by 170.8 Paul of Tella made his translation at the Enaton9 monastery near Alexandria, Egypt, in 615–617.10 He rendered the Old Greek translation found in Origen’s Hexapla into Syriac, preserving annotations regarding Aquila, Symmachos, and Theodotion in the text and margins. His translation often mirrors the Greek, but not always. Thus, in the commandment to honor one’s parents in Exod 20:12, he renders “your father” by two words, + ܕ$,* , as in the Greek (τον πατερα σου) in contrast to the Peshitta ( + ܟ ), but not so the following “your mother,” where he retains the reading of the Peshitta ܘ+ .* in contrast to the Greek, which lacks the second person pronoun, reading merely και την μητερα. Similarly, he renders τους αδελφους αυτου “his brothers” as ܕ$, ̈ ܐ (Exod 2:11) and και το ονομα μου “my name” as ܘH/ ܕ$,& (Exod 6:3), in contrast to the Peshitta’s renderings ܗܝ ̈ ܐ “his brothers” and ܘH/& “my name” respectively. Whereas the Greek does not have an equivalent of the infinitive absolute of the Hebrew, Paul of Tella at times retains it from the Peshitta, as in Exod 2:19,

5 Andreas Juckel, “Approximation of the ‘Traditions’ in Jacob of Edessa’s Revision of Isaiah,” in Malphone w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, edited George A. Kiraz (Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 3; Piscataway: Gorgias, 2008), 243. 6 Michael P. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament: An Introduction (ucop 56; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 258. 7 Weitzman, The Syriac Version, 259. 8 Jan Joosten, The Syriac Language of the Peshitta and Old Syriac Versions of Matthew: Syntac- tic Structure, Inner-Syriac Developments and Translation Technique (ssl 22; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 25–27; and Joosten, “The Old Testament Quotations in the Old Syriac and Peshitta Gospels,” Textus 15 (1990): 55–76, esp. 75–76. 9 Enaton (ἔνατον) means “ninth” in Greek, being neuter to agree with μίλιον “mile,” the monastery being located near the ninth milestone west of Alexandria on the road to Libya (see “Enaton, The,” in Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia online [http://ccdl.libraries .claremont.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/cce/id/784/rec/1], accessed 16 Nov 2012, and A. Juckel, “The Enaton,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage [ed. Sebastian P. Brock et al.; Piscataway: Gorgias, 2011], 144–145). 10 Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition, 28.