[B-Greek] PASCA

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Apr 3 10:17:47 EDT 2007


Ken HRWTHSE
> What evidence do we have that PASCA is "an exact transliteration of  the **Aramaic** word for 'Passover'  (_paskha_);"? I see problems with this supposition.
>
> We have evidence that the first vowel of the Aramaic word for passover is I rather than A, judging
> by earliest vocalized Aramaic instance of PSX (Targums Onkelos and Jonathan both have
> pisxa' ) and the full orthography of Pesikta de Rav Kahana, which has PYSXH.

This is a good point but there are complications that may reflect some
of the complications within both Aramaic and Hebrew dialectology.
There are not a few words that shift between a possibly
Eastern/Massoretic [i] vowel and a Western [a] vowel. for example, we
have names like Miryam//Maryam. And the word RIBBONI (Eastern) 'my
lord' versus RABBOUNI (Western). This last word, of course, is found
in our Greek NT and in Mishna codex Kaufman (Hebrew) and Cairo Geniza
targum (Aramaic).

One of my basic points is that NT scholarship simply ignores the
Hebrew side of the background. Notice the statement in the previous
thread: "It's an exact transliteration of  the **Aramaic** word for
'Passover' (_paskha_) " That is a strange statement when it is
attested as a transliteration of the **Hebrew** word for Passover in
the LXX.
Two things must be remembered:

1)  Linguistically, Hebrew must be included as a possible background
of an attestation of SIKERA or PASXA or SABBATA.
a. SIKERA could be naturally used in Greek by someone working from a
HEBREW text. This is attestd in the LXX.
b. SIKERA might be naturally used in Greek by someone working from an
Aramaic text, though I don't have any exmaples to verify this. (The
targumim even tended to avoid shexar, no doubt from a complex matrix
of reasons that we must guess at.)
c. SIKERA might be naturally used in Greek by someone writing in
Greek. Proof on this is sometimes difficult, though.

2. It is methodologically flawed to cite a Greek form with "a", e.g.
SABBATA to impreach an ancient author's claim that he is writing a
Hebrew word EBRAIKOS/EBRAISTI (in Greek). Josephus was conscious of
the distinction of Hebrew EBRAIKOS and Aramaic SURIAKOS and correctly
distinguished them and his language names in his writings as long as
moderns don't filter these through false formulae (as if expecting
Josephus to adhere to their expectation rather than the LXX's).

Anyway, while the sociolinguistics of the first century are not the
domain of this list, the meaning and classification of Greek loanwords
in -A and Greek language names would seem to be a Greek language
question.

A classic locus of how these can be misread by moderns is ARISTEUS 11,
which probably deserves a separate thread.

EERWSQE
Randall

-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη πληθυνθείη
שלום לכם וברכות
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com


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