The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition, Volume 1 (OT I)

741 Pages·2010·81.428 MB·English

by  Clemens Joseph David (editor)

The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition

The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition
Volume 1 (OT I)
Edited by
Clemens Joseph David
A
1
aortas press
2010
Gorgias Press LLC, 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA
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2010 -V.
1
ISBN 978-1-60724-891-0
Printed in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION TO THE GORGIAS EDITION
BY SEBASTIAN P. BROCK
'Of all the available printed editions of the Peshitta, this is the most complete, beautiful and handy. It is
thoroughly vocalized, its print is very clear, owing to the use of beautiful Syriac type, and the paper is
good and lasting'. These were the words of Joshua Bloch,1 writing ninety years ago, and they remain just
as true today.
The Mosul Peshitta was published in three volumes by the Dominican Press (vols. 1—2, Old Testa-
ment, 1887, 1888; vol. 3, New Testament, 1891) and paid for by the Dominican Mission.2 It was the only
fifth printed edition that covered the entire Syriac Bible. Although the Peshitta New Testament had been
printed in 1555, it was not until the Paris Polyglot Bible of 1645 that the whole Syriac Bible was pub-
lished, with both Testaments together; the text was republished just over a decade later in Brian Walton's
Polyglot Bible (1657). Walton's text was very largely derived from the Paris Polyglot, which itself was
based on late manuscripts, in particular Paris Syr. 6 of the 17th century (17a5 in the Leiden Peshitta). Al-
though drawing largely from these earlier editions, Samuel Lee's edition of the Peshitta, published over a
century and a half later (OT, 1823; NT 1826), also made use of some earlier manuscripts for the Old Tes-
tament, including the famous Buchanan Bible, an illustrated twelfth-century manuscript which had found
its way to the Syrian Orthodox community in South India, and had then been presented by Mar Diony-
sius VI to Claudius Buchanan in 1806.3 Lee's text was a considerable improvement on that of the Poly-
glot Bibles, and its Old Testament text is still reproduced today in the United Bible Societies' edition of
the Syriac Bible (1979 and reprints).
These three European printed editions of the Syriac Bible were all based on manuscripts belonging
to the West Syriac tradition (and for the most part on very late ones). This fact lent a special interest to
the next edition of the whole Syriac Bible, for it was produced in Urmia, in NW Iran, under the auspices
of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This was published in 1852, side by side
with a Modern Syriac translation made directly from the Hebrew text. The Peshitta text was evidently
based primarily on East Syriac manuscripts that were locally available, but for Chronicles, which is very
poorly transmitted in the East Syriac tradition, resort was made to using Lee's edition, and it seems likely
that elsewhere too, occasional use of Lee's text may have been made. Since the East Syriac text was gen-
erally a more conservative one, the Urmia edition was for the most part welcomed by scholars, as offer-
ing a more reliable text.4 As will be seen below ('Text'), the Mosul edition likewise provides a good East
Syriac text of the Peshitta, close to, but by no means identical with, that of the Urmia edition's text.
1 J. Bloch, 'The printed texts of the Peshitta Old Testament', American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures
37 (1920/21), pp. 136—44, here p. 141.
2 For the history of this important Press see J.-M. Fiey,' L'imprimerie des Dominicains de Mossoul 1860—1914',
-Aram 5 (1993), pp. 163—74; and for its publications, J.F. Coakley and D. Taylor, Syriac Books Printed, at the Dominican
Press, Mosul (Piscataway NJ, 2009). That the Dominican Mission covered the 'considerable expenses' is explicitly
stated in the Syriac Preface (but surprisingly not in the Latin).
3 Today in Cambridge University Library, ms. Oo.l.l,2 (12al in the Leiden edition of the Peshitta).
4 Its superiority (along with that of the Mosul edition) can readily be seen from the collations for Isaiah in
G. Diettrich's Ein Apparatus criticus %ur Pesitto %um Propheten Jesaia (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche
v
VI SEBASTIAN BROCK
The making of the Mosul Peshitta
The origins of the Mosul edition were not without a considerable amount of controversy, and a well-
documented account of this is provided by J.-M. Voste.5 Here only the bare outlines are given.
Roman Catholic missionaries working among the Chaldeans had for some time wanted printed
Syriac Bibles, or at least the Psalter and New Testament, in order to counterbalance the editions in both
Classical and Modern Syriac produced by the American Mission in Urmia.6 A 'corrected' copy of the
Urmia edition of the New Testament had been sent in 1862 to the Sacred Congregation for the Propaga-
tion of the Faith (the 'Propaganda') in Rome, along with a local manuscript copy of the Peshitta New
Testament made by a Chaldean priest. The manuscript was passed on to the Syriac scholar Pius Zingerle
to be examined; when he found that it had been corrected according to the Vulgate, and thus did not
represent the genuine Peshitta, the Propaganda sensibly declined to print it. Nevertheless, mindful of the
need for a printed edition, a few years later, in 1865, the Propaganda instructed their former student, the
Chorepiscopus Joseph David, to search for good manuscripts of biblical and liturgical books with a view
to providing editions 'exempt from all error'. Subsequently, in 1872, the Congregation of the Propaganda
proposed to the Dominican Mission in Mosul to undertake the printing of the Syriac Bible. The head of
the Mission, however, was hesitant, as he felt that this suggestion, coming from Rome, might cause diffi-
culties with the aged Chaldean Patriarch, Joseph VI Audo (1790—1878), in view of the latter's decidedly
difficult relationship with Pope Pius IX and the authorities in Rome. In the end, however, it turned out
that, when he met the Patriarch in 1877 and put the Propaganda's proposal to him, the Patriarch proved
to be favourable to the idea.
Since the Syriac characters used by the Dominican Mission's Press were not considered beautiful
enough for such a prestigious undertaking, a new font was designed, based on the calligraphy of the
priest Abaham Shekwana of Alqosh. Abraham happens to be a well-known scribe, and several of his
manuscripts are to be found in the Mingana Collection, Birmingham, including a Gospel Lectionary 'in a
very bold and handsome Estrangelo hand';7 more importantly, however, he was identified by J-M. Fiey as
the scribe who copied out for Alphonse Mingana the famous manuscript, now in Berlin, of the Chronicle
of Arbela, employing a hand imitating an early style of Estrangelo.8 Though the hand that Abraham
Shekwana used for the Chronicle of Arbela is considerably different from the font designed for the Mo-
sul Bible, it will be interesting to discover if the font turns out to resemble the same scribe's hand in
Wissenschaft, 8; Giessen, 1905); wherever the Urmia and Mosul editions go against the reading of the European
editions, they normally turn out to have the support of the oldest manuscripts.
5 J.-M. Vosté, 'La Peshitta de Mossoul et la revision catholique des anciennes versions orientales', in M-iscellanea
Giovanni Mercati, I (Studi et Testi 121; 1946), pp. 59-94.
6 Besides the 1852 edition of the whole Bible, with the Peshitta and a Modern Syriac translation made from He-
brew and Greek, there were editions of the New Testament into Modern Syriac (1846, made from the Peshitta,
which accompanied it), 1854 (without Peshitta), and 1864 (in this the text was heavily revised on the basis of the
Greek); for the issues behind this, see my 'Translating the New Testament into Syriac (Classical and Modern'), in
J. Krasovec (ed.), Interpreting the Bible (Ljubljana/Sheffield, 1998), pp. 371-85, esp. 379-83. The Lazarists in Urmia
eventually managed to produce an edition of the Gospels and Acts in 1877, in both Classical and Modern Syriac.
7 Mingana Syr. 537 (A. Mingana, Catalogue, cols. 983—4. cat ; Abraham copied this in 1911 from a manuscript of
1571/2 which itself have been copied by 'Abdisho' of Soba in 1284/5. Other mss. in Birmingham copied by Abra-
ham are Mingana 47, 50, 52 (he was also the former owner of Mingana syr. 98).
8 J.-M. Fiey, 'Auteur et date de la Chronique d'Arbèles', L'Orient Syrien 12 (1967), pp. 265-302, here 281-2. For
his handwriting for the Chronicle, see the illustration inj. Assfalg, Syrische Handschriften (Verzeichnis der orientalis-
chen Handschriften in Deutschland V; 1963), Plate 3; also the photographic edition of the text by
P. Kawerau, in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 467, 1985.
PREFACE VII
Mingana Syr. 537. (It is intriguing that Mingana once claimed that he had himself had a hand in revising
and correcting the Mosul New Testament; since he had only just entered the Seminary school, aged 13, at
the time when the New Testament was being printed, the very most that this could have amounted to
would have been being shown some of the proofs!).9
The scholar who had been approached by the Propaganda and who was primarily responsible for
editing the text, Joseph David (1829-1890), is better known under his episcopal name of Mar Klimis
(Clemens) David, taken after his appointment as Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Damascus in 1879.10 Mar
Klimis was a very accomplished scholar, who had a good knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, as well
as Syriac and Arabic. Earlier in his career he had been closely involved in the preparation of an edition of
the Arabic text of the Bible (published in 4 volumes, Mosul 1875-1878), and in 1877 he had published an
interesting revision of the Peshitta Psalter that had made use of his knowledge of Hebrew.11 For the Mo-
sul Peshitta, however, his aim was not to revise the Peshitta text, but to reproduce the traditional text in a
carefully edited form. Not surprisingly, he evidently took as his starting point the text of the Urmia edi-
tion of 1852, which provided a better text of the Peshitta than that of any of the European editions of
the time, including that of Lee (1823). As will be seen below, a careful comparison of the two editions
indicates that Mar Klimis by no means took over the text of the Urmia edition uncritically. Also closely
involved in the publication of the Mosul Peshitta was the Chaldean archbishop of Amid, Mar 'Abdisho'
Khayyat (1828-1899), who was later (in 1895) to become Patriarch. It was he who (besides the Patriarch
of the time, Mar Elia XII) wrote the prefaces to the volumes.
By 1881/2 the printing of the text had already begun. At that point, however, further progress was
halted, since a major disagreement on a matter of editorial policy had arisen between Mar Klimis and the
Apostolic Delegate, Mgr H. Altmayer: the latter, mindful of the special authority accorded to the Latin
Vulgate by the Council of Trent (decree of 1546), was insisting that passages absent from the Peshitta but
present in the Vulgate should be included, marked by brackets. This was something to which Mar Klimis
very strongly objected, and he refused to translate the requisite passages. Altmayer nevertheless went
ahead and had them translated from Latin by someone else. The printing was held up and the whole mat-
ter was referred to the Propaganda in Rome. A sample, translated into Latin, was prepared of how the
beginning of Bar Sira might appear, following Altmayer's proposed format; this in fact showed up how
extremely awkward such a composite text would be: in chapter 1 of Bar Sira the Peshitta, translated di-
rectly from Hebrew, lacked altogether the verses 3, 5 and 7 in the Vulgate, translated from Greek; ac-
cordingly, the intention was to translate the Latin of these verses into Syriac and to incorporate them,
bracketed, into the Peshitta's text. The result, if Altmayer's principles had been followed, would have
been an extraordinary hybrid. Fortunately Propaganda in 1884 sought the opinion of one of the finest
Catholic biblical scholars of the day, Fr. Augustine Ciasca; very sensibly, he pronounced in favour of Mar
Klimis' position, that the Peshitta, like the Greek Septuagint, should be respected as an authoritative text
in its own right. The other scholar consulted, Fr. Rudolf Comely, came to the same conclusion, but, pre-
9 A Mingana, 'The remaining Syriac versions of the Gospels', Expository Times 26 (1914/5), pp. 379—81, here 379,
where he speaks of 'the four editions [sic!] published at Mosul that I myself revised and corrected'. The 'four' is
evidently due to a confusion with the Arabic edition, published before he was born!
10 On him see J.-M. Voste, Clement Joseph David. Archeveque syrien de Damas. Notes bio-bibliographiques'
Orientalia Christiana Periodica 14 (1948), pp. 219—75; and B.F. Affas, Iqlimis YusufDa'ud (Baghdad, 1985).
11 For this, see my 'A neglected revision of the Peshitta Psalter', in C. McCarthy and J.F. Healey (eds), Biblical and
Near Eastern Essays. Studies in Honour of Kevin J. Cathcart (London, 2004), pp. 131—42. Two years after the publication
of his Psalter he produced a valuable grammar of Syriac (subsequently translated into Latin by the future patriarch,
Ephrem Rahmani (published in Mosul, 1896); towards the end of his life he was much involved in the editing of the
Mosul Fenqitho, published in 7 volumes over the years 1886—96.
VIII SEBASTIAN BROCK
ferring a longer term and wider benefit, suggested that it would be better first to provide a scientific edi-
tion of the Peshitta, whose text would then be respected by Protestant as well as Catholic scholars and
communities. As Voste commented, 'the better is often the enemy of the good':12 if Cornely's suggestion
had been accepted, the Mosul edition would have never seen the light of day, since his proposed scien-
tific edition never even got off the ground. Fortunately the Congregation of the Propaganda had the wis-
dom to realise that scholars are often wildly over-optimistic about how long large scale projects are likely
to take, and their final decision, made on 30th March 1885, was that the printing of the Mosul Bible
should go ahead without further delay, along the lines of Ciasca's recommendation; at the same time they
gave a nod of approval to the general idea of a critical edition.13 The decision was conveyed to Mosul on
April 19th 1885, indicating that 'this ancient and venerable version should remain with its original integ-
rity', although those New Testament books absent from the Peshitta should be supplied from existing
Syriac versions (and not retranslated from Latin). A copy of the Old Testament was in due course pre-
sented to Pope Leo XIII in Rome on 4th December, 1888.
Contents
One of the main deficiencies of the Urmia edition in the eyes of the Mosul edition's editors was the ab-
sence of a number of books which were read liturgically, notably Wisdom and Bar Sira (Ecclesiasticus),
and which are considered as 'Deutero-canonical' books, rather than as 'Apocrypha'. Mar Klimis had also
wanted to include (besides 1-2 Maccabees, which are present) 3 Maccabees, extant in Syriac14 and present
in the influential Sixtine edition of the Greek Septuagint (1587), but this was in the end turned down by
the Propaganda.
In Daniel chapter 3 the Prayer of Ananias and his companions (verses 24—90), found in the Peshitta
and Septuagint, but absent from the Aramaic original and hence excluded also from the Urmia edition15
as well as from Jerome's Vulgate, are duly to be found present. The uncertainty of what to do in the case
of Esther had played a considerable role in the discussions in Rome: while the Peshitta text of this book
corresponds closely with the Hebrew, the Greek is considerably longer, with additional material at certain
points; Jerome included these in his Latin translation, but gathered them all together and placed them at
the end of the book, with notes concerning them (these are reproduced in brackets in editions of the
Vulgate). Should the Vulgate position be kept, or should the additional sections be inserted in their
proper place (as in the Septuagint)? Although the Propaganda eventually decided upon the latter option,
what we find in the Mosul edition is Jerome's arrangement, for after Peshitta text (1:1—10:3) there follow
all the extra material found in the Greek, at the same time incorporating Jerome's notes. For the text of
the additional sections the Propaganda had urged a search for another Syriac version that had the extra
material; this would have been the Syrohexapla, but unfortunately no manuscript of Esther in this version
has survived, and so 10:4—16:24 will be a retroversion from Latin, one of the very rare cases where
Altmayer must have had his way.16 The disadvantage, of course, is that these passages (designated below
12 J.-M. Vosté, 'Projet d'une édition critico-ecclésiastique de la Pesitta sous Léon XIII', Biblica 28 (1947),
pp. 281—6, here 283 ('le mieux est souvent l'ennemi du bien').
13 It was not until 1953 that the idea of preparing a critical edition of the Peshitta Old Testament was taken up
again, resulting in the establishment in 1959 of the Peshitta Institute in Leiden. Two years later the invaluable List of
Old Testament Peshitta Manuscripts was published. To date thirteen volumes of the edition have appeared.
14 It features in three of the four early complete Syriac Old Testaments (7al, 8al and 12al of the Leiden edi-
tions).
15 And earlier excluded from Lee's edition; this defect is sadly never made good in the UBS edition.
16 In the United Bible Societies' edition the text of the 'Apocrypha' has been provided, reproduced from the
handwriting of Yuhanon Seven; that Yuhanon Seven took the texts from the Mosul edition is made absolutely clear
PREFACE IX
as A-F)17, which have been removed from their original context, do not any longer make very good
sense. For the benefit of those who would like to read the narrative as it originally stood in its longer
form, the sequence in which the constituent elements should be read is as follows:
A + 1:1 — 3:13 + B + 3:14 — 4:17 + C + D + 5:3 — 8:12 + E + 8:13 — 10:3 + F
For the New Testament, it is not surprising that the non-Peshitta books (2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude,
and Revelation) were included, seeing that these, although not found in the East Syriac tradition, were
part of the wider Syriac tradition; accordingly for these, use was made of translations found in the Syrian
Orthodox tradition (see below, under Text). The same policy had also been adopted in the Urmia edition.
More controversial, and subject to much difference of opinion, was the case of two famous passages ab-
sent from the Peshitta, John 7:53—8:11, concerning the Woman caught in adultery, and the verse in
I John 5:7 concerning the addition of the three witnesses in heaven alongside the three on earth. The
former passage is widely attested in Greek manuscripts, and exists in a Syriac translation probably made
by Paul, Syrian Orthodox bishop of Edessa in the early seventh century; by contrast, the latter is only
found in the printed Vulgate text where it goes back to small number of Old Latin and Vulgate manu-
scripts, the earliest of which belong to about the ninth century.
The Propaganda finally decided that the passage in John should be included, taken form the existing
Syriac translation. On the question of whether the addition should be indicated by brackets or not, they
considered that this was not necessary. As for I John 5:7, they considered that 'it is not appropriate for it
to be omitted', without specifying whether or not it should be indicated by brackets. Perhaps on the basis
of the Propaganda's specific guidance concerning the Gospel passage, the Mosul edition prints the addi-
tion in I John 5:7 likewise without putting it in brackets.
Order of Books
The order of the books follows the one which is regularly found in editions of the Latin Vulgate, with
Tobit, Judith and Esther following immediately after Ezra and Nehemiah, and with Wisdom and Bar Sira
(Ecclesiasticus) coming between the Song of Songs and Isaiah. That the Vulgate order was followed is
hardly surprising, given that there was no single traditional order of Old Testament books in the Syriac
tradition,18 and that one of the aims of the Mosul edition was to provide a Catholic Bible, in order to
provide the Chaldean Church with a counterpart to the Urmia edition which printed the books in the
order found in Protestant Bibles.
For the New Testament the traditional Peshitta sequence of having the Letters of James, 1 Peter and
1 John following Acts19 was discarded in favour of the standard order of books found in European edi-
tions; this was no doubt due to the incorporation of the non-Peshitta books, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude and
Revelation.
by his inclusion (at the end of Judith, without any warning!) of this extra material belonging to the end of Esther
(pp. 121-4).
i? A = 11:2-12:6 of the Mosul edition (followed by the UBS); B = 13:1-7; C = 13:8-14:9; D = 15:4-19; E =
16:1-24; F = 10:4-11:1.
18 For a table giving the order of books in the only four early complete Peshitta Old Testaments (now in Milan,
Paris, Florence, and Cambridge; 7al, 8al, 9al and 12al in the Leiden edition), see my The Bible in the Syriac Tradition
(Piscataway, 2006), p. 116. For further details concerning sequence of books, see J.-C. Haelewyck, 'Le canon de
l'Ancien Testament dans la tradition syriaque', in F. Briquel Chatonnet and F. Le Moigne (eds), T'Ancien Testament en
Syriaque (Etudes syriaques 5; 2008), pp. 141—71.
19 Preserved in the standard British and Foreign Bible Society's edition of 1920 (and reprints).