Transmission
The Aramaic Tongue
Of the languages of the ancient Near East, one has the odd distinction of having been spoken almost everywhere and written in almost nowhere, until suddenly it was written everywhere. Aramaic began…
Archive
Aramaic
Transmission
The Syriac New Testament
In the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a scholar lifted a palimpsest from a shelf and found beneath it the oldest surviving…
Transmission
The Murashu Scribes
In the late spring of 1893, on the mound of ancient Nippur in Iraq, a workman clearing collapsed rubble from a room found clay tablets lying on the floor where they had…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos and the Birth of Aramaic Scripture
Few documents of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic periods have been more continuously used than the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that Jewish tradition calls Targum Onkelos. It is the…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos And The Aramaic Pentateuch Tradition
Long before the Hebrew text received its Tiberian pointing, and before the Masoretes fixed its consonants in the canonical line we now read, Jewish communities in the land of Israel and the…
Scripture
The Elephantine Papyri and the Jewish Colony at Elephantine
In 1893 a young American collector named Charles Edwin Wilbour stood in the antiquities market at the southern Egyptian town of Aswan and bought a sheaf of brittle brown sheets of papyrus…