An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts

[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

From this

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

'As for the MS. Neofiti I, I think, too, that it is an important MS. for the knowledge of Palestinian Aramaic. It contains the complete text of the Palestinian Targum with a critical apparatus of continuous variant readings written in the margins. The 450 folios are in excellent state of preservation and not a single verse is missing. Only the marginal notes in some pages are difficult to read (they are not only in cursive script but also written with poor ink). I am dealing now with the facsimile edition of this MS. In the next issue of Sefarad will appear a short note, similar to that which has already appeared in Estudios Biblicos, next issue. The Aramaic of Neofiti I is of the same kind as that of the Palestinian Targum of Masoreten des Westens, ii. But the recensions do not entirely agree. The MS. has been copied in Rome, probably in the fifteenth century, by an Italian Jew.'

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

An examination of two sample passages, Gen. xxiii. 16-xv. 1 and Exod. xxxiii. 3-xxxiv. 6 (four double columns), shows clearly that we have to do with a Targum differing widely from Onkelos, agreeing in a number of readings with the Pseudo-Jonathan Targum and with the Fragment Targum where extant for these verses and against the Onkelos text. For instance, the King of Bela (מלך בלע) at Gen. xiv. 2 is rendered 'the king of the city which swallowed up (בלע) its inhabitants' as in P-J contra Onkelos.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

An illustration of the character and antiquity of this new Targum occurs in the halakha of Exodus xxii. 5, 6. According to the Mishnah these two verses refer to the damage done to a neighbor's field, etc. The Hebrew of verse 4, however, is ambiguous, and can be taken to mean that fire (not a beast) had strayed or spread into a neighbor's field. This is how the Geniza Targum understood the words, and thus both verses refer to damage wrought by fire. The Neofiti MS. agrees with the Geniza Targum, and, if anything, is even more explicit.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

On this halakha Dr. Kahle writes (ibid.): '. . . this interpretation is in clear contrast to all the official Jewish authorities and can be understood in an old Jewish text only on the assumption that it goes back to very ancient times, before the oral law codified in the Mishnah had any validity. That such a translation is preserved in an old scroll of the Palestinian Targum is certainly of importance. It shows that written Targums must have existed in very ancient times.'

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

The new Aramaic document is a kind of midrash on Gen. xii and xiv. The date is not absolutely certain, but, if we accept the general conclusions of the archaeologists, the scroll itself must have been written before A.D. 70. Affinities with the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha (especially the Book of Jubilees) support this early dating. Before a sufficient number of characteristic Aramaic idioms of a particular period can be adduced to identify the period of the scroll by linguistic criteria, we shall have to await publication of the whole text. The published folios, however, already yield one important philological fact: the scroll makes use of the Aramaic temporal conjunctions אדין and בדין (e.g., col. xxii, lines 2, 18, 20), found no less than 26 times in Daniel alone, but never in Targum Aramaic. In several other cases we meet with non-Targumic usage, e.g., חלתא (col. xxii, line 4) in the sense of 'valley'; Targumic חללא means 'cavern'; Syriac [....], the 'sheath' of a sword. The verb אתחלם (line 5) in the meaning 'grow strong' is attested in Syriac, but not in Targumic Aramaic. Linguistically the scroll would seem, therefore, to belong to the age of the 'old Aramaic'. Both from a linguistic and literary point of view, it is an invaluable witness to the Aramaic language and literature of the time of Christ.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "Recent Discoveries and Developments in Palestinian Aramaic" chapter of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Some parts of the text have a considerable literary merit, e.g., the description of Sarah's beauty at col. xx and the Parable of the Cedar at col. xix. The second (in Avigad and Yadin's English version) reads:

And I, Abram, dreamed a dream . . .
and lo! I saw in my dream one cedar tree
and one palm
. . . and men came and sought to cut down
and uproot the cedar and to leave the palm
And the palm cried out and said, 'Cut not
down the cedar . . . '
And for the sake of the palm the cedar was saved.

(The cedar is Abraham, the palm Sarah, through whose offer of herself Abraham was saved in Egypt.) These are probably the closest literary parallels we possess in Aramaic to the original (poetic) parables and poems of Jesus.

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[John Reece]

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Beginning of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus

Since the publication of Kahle's views in Masoreten des Ostens and Masoreten des Westens of the Aramaic Targum has been raised recently by E. Y. Kutscher, and Kahle's view challenged. Kutscher's arguments, however, which will be considered later, were anticipated by the work of a younger scholar, Dr. Gerald J. Kuiper, now Associate Professor of New Testament at the Theological Seminary, Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, North Carolina. Dr. Kuiper undertook, under my supervision, an investigation into the relationship between the different strands of the Targum tradition, and in particular the question of the relationship of the Pseudo-Jonathan Targum and Targum Onkelos. The results, which it is hoped will be published soon, have proved surprisingly interesting: Onkelos, while admittedly showing traces of Babylonian influence, appears nevertheless to have been an authoritative redaction of the same kind of Palestinian Targum tradition as is preserved, still in its fluid state, in the Fragment Targum, the Geniza Fragments, Pseudo-Jonathan, and Targum Neofiti I.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

We need not, therefore, be so skeptical about the value of Dalman's Aramaic Grammar as Kahle was: at the same time, it must be admitted with Kahle that the more idiomatic and freer Aramaic of the pre-Onkelos Palestinian Targum tradition uninfluenced by the Babylonian dialect or the need to translate the Hebrew word by word, is a much better source of knowledge for the Aramaic of the New Testament period.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Work on the problem of the connexions and interrelationships of the different strands in the Palestinian Targum tradition is still in progress, and must inevitably be delayed until the (long awaited) publication of the editio princeps

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

So far as the language of the Targums was concerned, Kahle was firmly convinced that Dalman was wrong in taking Onkelos and the related Targum to the Prophets as his main authorities for first-century Palestinian Aramaic, the so-called 'Jerusalem' Targums having been relegated to a secondary position: the latter, together with such close relatives as Samaritan and Christian Palestinian Syriac, seemed to Kahle to be much closer to the original language of Jesus and the best post-Christian sources for the reconstruction of the Aramaic of the verbi Christi. This he sought to demonstrate by his now well-known discovery that ribboni (my Lord) in Onkelos was pronounced rabbouni in the Geniza fragment targum, exactly as at John xx. 16 (cf. Mark x. 51). In view of this, Kahle held that a study of the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of his Geniza fragments, and indeed of the whole of the Palestinian Targum tradition, so far as it was extant, was the next urgent task in Aramaic studies. This view was shared―and to a large extent reached independently through the study of Masoreten Westens, ii―by the late Professor A. J. Wensinck, who carried his work to the point of preparing, on the basis of existing editions of the Palestinian Pentateuch Targum, a lexicon of these texts to supplement Levy's (or the smaller lexica of Jastrow or Dalman).

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

No one will deny the urgency or the need for grammatical and lexicographical studies in those particular areas if we are to extend our knowledge of the Aramaic language, and particularly of the language as it was spoken and written in the New Testament period. The situation, however, has changed in some important respects since the publication of Masoreten des Westens (or The Cairo Geniza, but also in their literary form and character, no less than in language, exhibiting literature which serves as a much closer prototype of the Aramaic portions and especially the original Aramaic poetry of the Gospels. There is also the inestimably valuable text (450 folios) of Neofiti, which will also have to be scrutinized by the philologist, once an edition is available. In fact, it is this last difficulty, applying to all the Palestinian Pentateuch Targums, which makes grammatical investigation or lexicographical studies at present difficult, if not impossible. Our first and most urgent needs are for editions of the Palestinian Pentateuch Targum (or Targums) similar to Dr. Sperber's splendid edition of Onkelos and Jonathan, which must also, however, not be overlooked in any full study of early Palestinian Aramaic.

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[John Reece]

Continued from the last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

It was characteristic of Kahle that he lost no opportunity of presenting positions with which he had once identified himself in the light of the latest developments in his field. Thus, just shortly before the second edition of his Cairo Geniza was published, he wrote a long article in Z.N.T.W.The Cairo Geniza brought inter alia

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