[B-Greek] ARISTEAS 11, SYRIAKH, and language clarity in Greek

Tory Thorpe torythrp at yahoo.com
Tue Apr 3 14:34:12 EDT 2007


This is very good. Thank you Randall.

Tory Thorpe


--- Randall Buth <randallbuth at gmail.com> wrote:

> There is often confusion on words like SYRIAKH and
> EBRAIKH among
> students of Koine Greek. Here is a passage from
> ARISTEAS that has
> somehow gotten into the modern scholarly landscape
> 'upsidedown',
> thanks to a widely read citation in Matthew Black.
> 
> ARISTEAS 11, unicode:
> ὁ δὲ Δημήτριος εἶπεν
> Ἑρμηνείας προσδεῖται·
> χαρακτῆρσι γὰρ ἰδίοις
> κατὰ ἸοÏ
δαίων χρῶνται,
> καθάπερ Αἰγύπτιοι τῇ τῶν
> γραμμάτων θέσει,
> καθὸ καὶ φωνὴν ἰδίαν
> ἔχοÏ
σιν.
> ὑπολαμβάνονται ΣÏ
ριακῇ
> χρῆσθαι·
> τὸ δ᾿ οὐκ ἔστιν, ἀλλ᾿
> ἕτερος τρόπος.
> 
> O DE DHMHTRIOS EIPEN
> ERMHNEIAS PROSDEITAI,
> XARAKTHRSI GAR IDIOIS KATA IOUDAIWN XRWNTAI,
> KAQAPER AIGUPTIOI TH TWN GRAMMATWN QESEI,
> KAQO KAI FWNHN IDIAN EXOUSIN.
> UPOLAMBANONTAI SURIAKH XRHSQAI,
> TO DE OUK ESTIN, ALL' ETEROS TROPOS
> 
> Demetrios said
> "it needs translation,
> for they use the own characters according to
> Judaeans
> just as Egyptians when placing letters,
> because they have their own sound.
> They are assumed to use the Syrian (=Aramaic)
> language,
> but it isn't, but a different manner (of speech).
> 
> Matthew Black, while explaining his view of
> EBRAISTI, added a bizarre
> comment and reference to Aristeas, AAGA-3, p.48,
> "The use of the term 'Hebrew' to refer to Aramaic is
> readily
> explicable, since it described the peculiar dialect
> of Aramaic which
> had grown up in Palestine since the days of Nehemiah
> and which was
> distinctively Jewish (with a distinctive Hebrew
> script associated with
> it, and a large proportion of borrowings from
> classical hebrew). It is
> these differences to which the letter of Aristeas is
> referring and not
> to two different languages, Hebrew and Aramaic
> (Syriac).footnote 3
>    [[footnote 3:
> ... 'They (the Hebrew Scriptures) need to be
> translated', answered
> Demetrius, 'for in the country of the Jews they use
> a peculiar
> alphabet, and speak a peculiar dialect. They are
> supposed to use the
> Syriac tongue, but this is not the cae; their
> language is quite
> different.' The reference is to the peculiar dialect
> of Aramaic spoken
> by the Jews, a dialect of West Aramaic; quite
> different from Syriac,
> the dialect of East Aramaic which was in regular use
> as the standard
> Aramaic language.]] "
> 
> 
> This a a classic textbook that most NT scholars have
> cut their teeth
> on. Surprising, Black's comments and viewpoint on
> this text are often
> echoed, despite blatant mistakes and anachronisms.
> What kind of mistakes?
> 1. In the third century BCE the standard Aramaic was
> not 'Syriac' but
> a continuation of Imperial Aramaic.
> 2. Jewish literary Aramaic in the third century BCE
> would have been
> quite close to what we find in earlier Elephantine
> and later Qumran.
> This is could not have been the "different kind of
> language" that
> Demetrios is referring to.
> 3. There was hardly a distinctive, non-Aramaic
> script used by Jews for
> Aramaic. It was the opposite, the Judeans were using
> an Aramaic script
> for their Hebrew!
> 4. The obvious context, admitted by Black, is the
> Jewish Scriptures.
> Those are truly written in a different language from
> Aramaic: the
> Bible (OT) was not written in Aramaic, it was
> written in Hebrew.
> Contra Black, Aristeas 11 is clearly referring to
> the language of the
> Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, of course.
> 5. SYRIAKH is the Greek word for Aramaic, for all
> Aramaic. It is not
> restricted to the later Edessian dialect known today
> as 'Syriac'.
> SYRISTI is what the Aramaic of Daniel is called in
> the LXX, it is the
> Aramaic of the RabShaqe in Isaia 36. It is 'Aramaic'
> in Aristeas' day
> and in Josephus' day.
> 
> The biggest surprise in all of this is how a
> viewpoint like Black's
> about Aristeas, can be so wrong and yet remain in a
> third edition of a
> much quoted work.
> 
> Anyway, back to b-Greek concerns,  Aristeas 11 is
> one of many Greek
> texts where one sees the Greek word for Aramaic:
> SURIAKH and SYRISTI.
> Aristeas itself testifies to a common ancient
> perception within a
> neighboring country to Judea that  thought of Judea
> as using Aramaic.
> But it also corrects that perception by saying that
> the case was
> different and that the language of Judea and the
> Scriptures needs
> special translation.
> 
> It is not the purpose of the Greek list to explore
> how both can be
> true, that Judea both used SYRIAKH /Aramaic
> according to outsider
> perception and yet also another language. This note
> merely points out
> how the word SYRISTI is used. Unsurprisingly,
> Josephus also uses
> SYRISTI // SYRIAKH correctly and consistantly. But
> that is another
> story.
> 
> Randall
> 
> -- 
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη
> πληθÏ
νθείη
> שלום לכם וברכות
> ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
> randallbuth at gmail.com
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek
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