Aramaic

One or Two Articles on Boaz?

I had originally planned two articles on the character of Boaz and subsequently presented two separate papers. The first was on the figure of Boaz strictly within the biblical book of Ruth. The other was on how the Targumist had transformed the figure of Boaz in Targum Ruth. This progression made sense, of course, because one must first deal with the actually biblical text before one can consider how the Targumist has changed or adapted it in the Targum.

At the IOTS conference where I presented the second paper I was encouraged to simply create one larger article that engaged with the entire topic, beginning with the biblical figure of Boaz and moving into the Targumic interpretation. This weekend we have had a wonderful exchange around the topic of Boaz and men in the book of Ruth. In particular Sue of Suzanne’s Bookshelf has had a number of helpful and provocative critiques of my suggestion. Benj and others have contributed as well.

All of this has me thinking that I cannot really flow the one article easily into the other. Certainly the article on TgRuth will take as its basis and allude to my reading of how the biblical book presents Boaz, but to spend 10+ pages wrestling with the biblical text and modern scholarship on this figure to then move into the Targumic (and, referencing more broadly, rabbinic) interpretation doesn’t seem to me like it would flow well. So I ask you, should I do two articles or would you prefer one?

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon is Up, (sort of) Really!

Jun 21st, 2011

by Christian Brady.

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UPDATE: CAL is back up now, including our favorite, Targum Ruth! (Thanks Ed!)

CORRECTION: Sorry. I meant to specify Targum Ketuvim as not working yet. Ed Cook immediately wrote me to say that Targum is working for him. It is true that TgOnk and TgJon are working. PsJon does not appear to be up either…

Steve Caruso of The Aramaic Blog reports that The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon is Up. Except the Targum Ketuvim modules (and others?) are not. That is ok, as CAL points out, this is a labor of love so I am just very grateful that they have gotten so much done already. The story itself is worth posting here also:

A Note to our users: We apologize for the unavailability of our system during the six weeks between early May and mid-June, 2011. The CAL server was struck by a hacker from an ISP in London, UK precisely on the day that Dr. Kaufman left the country, apparently simply because he or she wanted a complete copy of our online version of Sokoloff’s DJPA and wanted to save the $100 for the second edition and received instead an early draft of the first edition, while totally comprimising the system. There is no indication that the identity of any of our users was looked for or their own privacy comprised in any way. The length of the delay is a direct function of the fact that we have failed to have any NEH funding renewed for many years now and the CAL continues on solely as a labor of love without any paid researchers.

This may not be “total” depravity, but it is pretty pathetic. I agree with Steve, when we find out who did this, it may not be pleasant.

DailyHebrew.com » The Genetic Relationship of Aramaic & Hebrew

Jun 21st, 2011

by Christian Brady.

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Short and to the point. Be sure to click through to get a bit more and some nice bibliography on the subject (and verb).

Two recent articles from well-respected news agencies have included fallacious details about the relationship between Hebrew and Aramaic. The first described the Aramaic dialect spoken in the first century of the Common Era as “a language which developed from the classical Hebrew of the scriptures, a few hundred years earlier,” and the second claimed that Aramaic is “the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic.”

So which one is it? Is Aramaic the root of Hebrew or did Aramaic develop from Hebrew? The answer, of course, is neither. Although they may be related by a shared lineage, there is not a direct genetic relationship between the two. That is to say, one did not derive from the other. Pete Bekins irascibly assimilates these two absurd statements with the tongue-in-check proposal that “Classical Hebrew developed into Aramaic which then morphed back into Modern Hebrew and Arabic.

via DailyHebrew.com » The Genetic Relationship of Aramaic & Hebrew.

New Translation of Targum Ruth Available (here!)

Jun 18th, 2011

by Christian Brady.

5 comments

Targum Ruth 2:4, Solger MS

I am very (very) pleased to post my translation of Targum Ruth. It can be found here and the opening comments and first verse are below. This is a first draft and the English needs smoothing, but I thought I would do a bit of “crowd sourcing.” Feel free to read it and comment. Short of access to Beattie’s edition (see below) if you have the Accordance Targum module ¹ then you have the base text or, once it is back online, you may view the Aramaic of TgRuth at CAL.

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This is a translation of Derek Beattie’s critical edition, Targum and Scripture: Studies in Aramaic Translations and Interpretations in Memory of Ernest G. Clarke, SAIS 2, ed. Paul V.M. Flesher (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 231-90. The base text is Sassoon 282 (S), which dates to 1182, the oldest MS available. I am grateful to Dr. Beattie for being will to allow his critical edition to be in my forthcoming book as an appendix.²

This is a first pass and does not contain various notes that will be present in the final version. In most cases where words are found in [] and are not italicized they are missing in the MS but are necessary to represent the Hebrew vorlage (MT). In some cases, particularly in TgRuth 1:1, there are words or phrases which are not in S (and are part of an aggadic expansion) but are necessarily for the expansion to make sense. If you have any corrections or comments (or corrections, remember, this is a first pass) please contact the me at cbrady@psu.edu.

The copyright is held by C. M. M. Brady. No use of this translation may be made without the author’s permission.

Chapter 1

1 When the judges led there was a [severe] famine in the land of Israel. Ten severe famines were decreed from Heaven to be in the world from the day of the creation of the world until the time when the King Messiah shall come, to reprove through them the inhabitants of the world. The first famine was in the days of Adam. The second famine was in the days of Lamech. The third famine was in the days of Abraham. The fourth famine was in the days of Isaac. The fifth famine was in the days of Jacob. The sixth famine was in the days of Boaz, who was called Ibzan (אבצן) the Righteous, who was from Bethlehem. The seventh famine was in the days of David, the King of Israel. The eighth famine was in the days of Elijah the prophet. The [ninth] famine was in the days of Elisha in Samaria. And the tenth famine will be [in the future], not a famine of eating bread nor a drought of drinking water, rather of hearing the word of prophecy from before the Lord. And when that famine was severe in the land of Israel a great man from Bethlehem of Judah went out and went to dwell in the field of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons.

Read all of Targum Ruth.

This translation will be in the Accordance translation module in due time. [↩]
The images of a TgRuth MS on this site are of Codex Solger MS 1-7.2° (Solger) and should not be confused with the base text used in the translation which is Sassoon. The Sassoon MS is in private hands and I have only a photocopy of a facsimile available and do not have permission to post the images. [↩]

Translation – Resistance is futile

Jun 17th, 2011

by Christian Brady.

1 comment

I make no bones about it, I am no linguist. I do not derive great joy (and usually, no joy at all) from hours spent trying to decipher and understand grammar. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when I have developed language skills and believe it is vital to read any text to be studied in its original language. (And I am really not that bad.) But I don’t get the great and deep satisfaction out of the linguistic aspect of the whole enterprise. My interests are exegetical, which require keen knowledge of the language, but not grammatical and linguistic. Thus to translating any text, in my current case, Targum Ruth, is vital to a project of understanding an ancient exegete’s interpretations. So I was late last night pounding my head against TgRuth 3:12 (thank you James Tucker for diving into it with me via twitter!)

This morning I awoke to find my good friend John Hobbins, who is an excellent linguist, writing about Translation. My translation of TgRuth should be done later today. Look for it here!

Turning now to the languages of the Bible: the bulk of the Bible is written in a vernacular: ancient Hebrew. Never mind that standard biblical Hebrew in particular was also, quite probably, a lingua franca relative to spoken dialects of Hebrew, regional or otherwise, in the late First through Second Temple periods, in the land of Israel and (as time went on, very importantly) in the diasporas of the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic periods. The point here: at the same time, and of utmost importance relative to the cultural confrontation of which ethnoi then and now are vehicles, standard biblical Hebrew was a vernacular.

Not just the content expressed in “classical” Hebrew, but the written language per se, form part of an anti-colonial project, in opposition to the culture and propaganda of which (the neo-Assyrian version of) “standard Babylonian” was the vehicle – assuming that (some of) the scribes who gave us the Bible were literate in that language and the “course” or curriculum to which it gave expression (the thesis of people like David Wright and Bernard M. Levinson); in opposition to (content expressed in) the more pervasive (and perhaps less insidious, though one should never forget Jeremiah 10:11, to be read in strict conjunction with Ps 82) the more widely used (and still often unknown, or poorly known) lingua franca of the Assyrian empire, Aramaic. These facts form part of the background of a comment like that found in Isaiah 36:11 and the style-switching that Gary Rendsburg has noted.1 On “the invention of Hebrew,” on Hebrew as a vernacular and vehicle for culture expressive of oppositional political theory (a theology), see the volume by Seth Sanders of that title, introduced here.

Still don’t understand why the difference between a lingua franca and a vernacular is a big deal? Try this article on for size, by Tim Parks (HT Charles Halton for the link). The title alone is worth the price of admission: “Your English is Showing.”

via Why biblical literature resists translation – Ancient Hebrew Poetry.