Article

1. The Bible in Syriac
2. Syriac is an eastern Aramaic dialect attested from the very beginning of the Christian era to the late middle ages. Its epicenter is Edessa, modern-day Urfa in Turkey. Syriac is the language of a rich Christian literature, both original and translated. Bible translations form an important component of this literature. They furnish much of the basic theological vocabulary of the language. The history of Bible translations mirrors the ever-increasing influence of the Greek-speaking church. The oldest part of the Bible in Syriac is the core of the Old Testament Peshitta (OTP): the entire Hebrew canon was translated from Hebrew into Syriac over a period of 100 years or more, starting at some point in the first half of the second century CE. Ben Sira, also translated from Hebrew, was added soon after. Other books were translated from Greek: Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, 1-4 Maccabees, additions to Esther, Jeremiah and Daniel, as well as 4 Ezra, and the Apocalypse of Baruch. Most of these books are already cited as scripture in Aphrahat and Ephrem in the fourth century. Later lists and pandect bibles show much variation in the books included in the Old Testament. The Prayer of Manasseh is present in a few manuscripts and lists (Haelewyck 2008). Psalms of Solomon and the apocryphal Psalms 151-155, although attested in Syriac translation, were never considered to be part of the Syriac bible. The first “translation” of any part of the New Testament was Tatian’s Diatessaron, around 170 CE. Although the original text of the Diatessaron has not been preserved, several indications show that Old Testament quotations in this gospel harmony generally followed the OT Peshitta (Joosten 2013: 247-275). This dependence helps to establish a relative date for the OT Peshitta, and is important also for the question of its milieu.

1. Origin and milieu
2. External testimony on the origin and early history of the OTP is exclusively late and tendentious (Weitzman 1999: 248-251). Philological evidence has allowed scholars to piece together a historical hypothesis. The date of the OTP can be established approximately on the basis of indirect evidence (see section 1): since Tatian, the author of the Diatesssaron, knew the OTP and used it in his rendering of OT quotations, the Syriac version of the OT must be earlier than 170 CE. More precisely, this date would appear to be valid at least for the books quoted abundantly in the gospels: the Pentateuch, Isaiah, Psalms. In fact, the Syriac translation of these books must have had a certain status among Syriac Christians for Tatian to bow to its authority in rendering the quotations. The earliest parts of the OTP must therefore be taken back to the first half of the second century CE. This date tallies with the language of the OTP, which exhibits several archaic features (Joosten 2013: 49-67). The date of the OTP strongly suggests that it is a Jewish work. It is hard to imagine a Christian community in the second century CE translating all of the Pentateuch, Isaiah, and Psalms before beginning a translation of the gospels. The Jewish identity of the translators is indicated also by he fact that the OTP was translated from the Hebrew with only sporadic influence from the Septuagint. The history of the OTP is analogous to that of the Septuagint: having started out as a purely Jewish writing, it came to be adopted by the early Syriac church, and consequently ceased being used by the Jewish community. Michael Weitzman has argued that the community producing the OPT passed from Judaism to Christianity over the period during which the different books were translated. This may well be true, although it is hard to prove from the extant sources.
3. Textual History
4. The Peshitta Institute, formerly in Leiden and now located in Amsterdam, has presided over the gathering and cataloguing of all known manuscripts of the OTP. Most of the books have been edited in critical editions, and the textual history of several books has been described in detail in the Monographs of the Peshitta Institute series. In his doctoral dissertation, Marinus Koster has worked out the main lines of the development of the OTP text on the basis of Exodus manuscripts (Koster 1977). His results have since been confirmed for several other books. Three successive phases can be distinguished. The oldest phase is found in manuscripts like 5b1 for Genesis and Exodus, and 9a1 for Kings. Unfortunately, this phase is not available for all books of the OTP. The next phase is that of the great pandects of the sixth to eighth century, and notably of the “Codex Ambrosianus,” 7a1, the lead manuscript of the Peshitta Institue edition. Finally, the third phase is the textus receptus found in later manuscripts and underlying the first editions of the OTP in the polyglots and in the Mosul, Urmia and Lee editions. Before Koster’s in-depth research, many scholars suspected the presence of secondary corrections on the basis of Hebrew texts in 5b1 and similar manuscripts. However, as Weitzman was able to show conclusively, such re-adjustment is unlikely for the OTP, in contradistinction to the Septuagint where it is one of the major causes of textual divergence (Weitzman 1999: 272-280). A practical implication of these considerations is that Peshitta Institute edition is to be used with circumspection. In many passages, the earliest readings are not to be found in the text but in the apparatus.