The Bible of Edessa, Towards a New English Translation of the Syriac Bible, Leiden, 2 August 2004
Wido
van Peursen
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
TEI XML encoding by
html2TEI.xsl
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2005
Vol. 8, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv8n1crvanpeursen
Wido van Peursen
The Bible of Edessa, Towards a New English Translation of the Syriac Bible, Leiden, 2 August 2004
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol8/HV8N1CRVanPeursen.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 8
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Syriac Bible
Peshitta
Translation
Edessa
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
[1] From 1
to 6 August 2004 the city of Leiden hosted the XVIIIth Congress
of the International Organization for the Study of the Old
Testament (IOSOT). Part of this congress was a seminar entitled
'The Bible of Edessa: Towards a New English Translation of the
Syriac Bible'. The conveners of this seminar were Bas ter Haar
Romeny and Wido van Peursen. The project to prepare a new
English translation of the Peshitta was launched in the late
nineties by the Peshitta Institute, Leiden. The first seminar
devoted to theoretical, practical and editorial questions
involved in this project was held in 1999 (see Hugoye 2/2 [1999].) The aim of the seminar at
the IOSOT conference was to reconsider the editorial decisions
that were the outcome of the first seminar and to reflect on
the theoretical issues underlying the translation.
[2] The
programme of the seminar consisted of two parts. The first part
contained three papers on the textual basis of the English
translation, linguistic aspects of the translation, and the way
in which the reception history should be accounted for in the
annotations. The second part contained two papers by people who
had already made much progress in their translation and could
tell from experience what problems are encountered. This was
followed by a general discussion, based on the article 'The New
English Annotated Translation of the Syriac Bible (NEATSB):
Retrospect and Prospect' by K.D. Jenner et al., which appeared
in Aramaic Studies 2/1 (2004) 85-106.
[3] Bas ter
Haar Romeny presented the first lecture of the seminar. He
discussed the textual basis of the English translation. In 1999
it had been decided that the BTR text of the Leiden Peshitta
edition would be the basis of the translation, 'though only in
the perspective of a well-founded text-critical and
text-historical evaluation'. At first sight this decision was
an unequivocal choice to take the main text of the edition as
the source of the English translation, but the added remark
about the text-critical evaluation left open the possibility
that variants containing text-critically preferable readings
could end up in the main text, with the BTR readings given in
an apparatus. Ter Haar Romeny argued for the latter option. The
most important reasons in his argument were the fact that the
Leiden edition is not a critical edition (its initiator P.A.H.
de Boer emphasised over and again that the main text should
only be consulted together with the critical apparatus) and the
observation that the editors of the Peshitta volumes display
different policies regarding variant readings to be included in
the main text.
[4] The
second lecture, by Wido van Peursen, dealt with the linguistic
issues of NEATSB. From the very start of the NEATSB project,
those involved in it believed that linguistics should play a
prominent role in the project. The main reason was the peculiar
situation that NEATSB is a translation-of-a-translation, in
which Syriac is both target language (of the Peshitta) and
source language (of the English translation). Van Peursen's
paper illustrated how linguistic considerations can contribute
to the preparation of the translation, taking as an example
linguistic and text-critical issues in the field of clause
combination.
[5] The
third lecture, by David Taylor, focused on the commentary on
the book of Psalms by Daniel of Salah. In the 1999 seminar it
had been decided that 'significant information about the
reception history' should be included in the annotations.
Taylor discussed the information that the commentary by Daniel
of Salah on the Psalms, the earliest Syriac commentary on this
book (from 542 CE), can provide for establishing dated readings
and developmental stages of the Peshitta text, and the
information it gives about early Syriac interpretation.
[6] David
Shepherd presented the first paper in the second part of the
seminar. In his translation of the Peshitta of Job he found a
clear tendency to diverge from the word order found in the
Hebrew text. In Job 2:5, for example, the Hebrew 'bone and
flesh' has been translated in the Peshitta with 'flesh and
bone'. This reversal of the word order occurs in other places
as well and may be due to the fact that the translators were
familiar with the expression 'flesh and bone' in the New
Testament (Luke 24:39).
[7] Gill
Greenberg, the NEATSB translator of Jeremiah, gave the second
paper in this part of the seminar. The Massoretic Text of
Jeremiah uses a number of words related to 'evil' and
'wrongdoing'. The Peshitta employs another set of words for
this semantic field. However, the correspondences between the
Hebrew and the Syriac are very diverse and, it seems,
inconsistent. This raises the question of what the English
translator should do: should he or she feel free to render them
with those English words for 'wrongdoing' that are most
appropriate to the context, or be more consistent in the
translation of the Syriac words.
[8] Two
other lectures during the IOSOT conference, although not
scheduled in the NEATSB seminar, were devoted to the Peshitta
as well. One was by Craig Morrison, who translates Samuel in
the NEATSB project, and the other by Herry van Rooy, the NEATSB
translator of Ezekiel. Morrison discussed the relationship of
the Peshitta of 2 Samuel with 1 Chronicles. There are some
indications that the translator or a later copyist of the
Peshitta of 2 Samuel borrowed from either the Hebrew or Syriac
text of 1 Chronicles. Because of the overall independent
character of the Syriac translations of 2 Samuel and 1
Chronicles, even in those cases where the Hebrew text is
difficult, Morrison argued that the borrowing occurred not at
the time of translation but during the transmission.
[9] Herry
van Rooy discussed the Peshitta of Ezekiel 1. His paper
addressed three issues: inner-Syriac variation, the relation
between the Peshitta and the Massoretic Text, and the relation
between the Peshitta and the Septuagint. The Peshitta follows
the Hebrew text rather closely and can be characterised as a
'relatively verbatim translation', even in those cases where
the Septuagint shows divergent readings.