Aramaic Levi Document

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The Aramaic Levi Document (also obsolete Aramaic Testament Levi ) is a Jewish script from the time of the Second Temple . It was first discovered among the finds from the Cairo Geniza . Other fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls . The relationship to Levi's Greek testament from the wills of the twelve patriarchs is unclear.

Description of the text witnesses

The Aramaic Levi Document was first discovered among the writings and fragments from the Cairo Geniza. In 1900 Herman L. Pass and John Arendzen published a sheet from the holdings of the University of Cambridge , call number T.-S. 16 fol. 94. These are the remains of a parchment sheet of two sheets. Each sheet is double-sided and contains two columns of 23 lines each. You can see pre-drawn auxiliary lines. One sheet has largely survived, only the upper part of the inner column is missing. From the second sheet, however, there are only remnants of a column. In total, the remains of six columns are preserved (referred to as Cambridge columns a – f). The font was defined as "Oriental hand, which can scarcely be later than the eleventh century" . The text that has been preserved shows parallels in content to the Greek will of Levi from the wills of the twelve patriarchs. However, since there are hardly any literal matches, it is obviously not a translation.

Shortly after the publication of the first Geniza fragment, however, in preparation for a critical edition of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, it was noticed that one of the Greek manuscripts from the Koutloumousiou monastery on Mount Athos contains additions that do not appear in any other manuscript of the Testaments. One of these three additions corresponds literally to column c of the Cambridge Geniza fragment. Thus this addition could be proven as a Greek translation of the Aramaic Levi document.

A composite manuscript of various biblical and patristic works in the Syrian language was also discovered , including excerpts from the Aramaic Levi document. The passage is a literal translation of a section of text from columns d and e of the previously known Geniza fragment.

A few years later another sheet was discovered in the holdings of the Bodleian Library (Oxford) from the Cairo Geniza, which could be identified as part of the Aramaic Levi Document, signature Heb c 27 fol. 56. It is comparatively well preserved: only a small part is missing on the inside, the outer column is slightly torn. On the basis of palaeographic comparisons, the sheet could be assigned to the same manuscript as the Cambridge fragment. Since the text from column b corresponds to the Greek manuscript Koutloumous 39, a coherent text could be created with the fragment from Cambridge. With the help of bookkeeping considerations , it has now also been possible to reconstruct that another double page must have existed between the fragments from Oxford and Cambridge, the text of which can be found in the Greek manuscript.

The Israeli expert on questions of medieval manuscripts Malachi Beit-Arié determined the font type again on the basis of photographs and came to the conclusion, "that the fragments belong to the earliest layer of Geniza material; despite the difficulty in dating the fragments due to lack of comparative material it seems to me […], that they were written before 1,000 […] ". Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone undertook a comprehensive revision of the genizate texts, including the translation, in 1979 and Émile Puech in 2002 and 2008, respectively. However, his French translation also included extensive text additions.

literature

  • Henryk Drawnel: An Aramaic Wisdom Text from Qumran. A New Interpretation of the Levi Document. JSJ.S 86. Leiden et al. a. 2004.
  • Jonas C. Greenfield; Michael E. Stone; Ester Eshel: The Aramaic Levi Document: Edition, Translation, Commentary. SVTP 19. Leiden u. a. 2004. ISBN 90-04-13785-8
  • Robert A. Kugler: From Patriarch to Priest. The Levi-Priestly Tradition from Aramaic Levi to Testament of Levi. Atlanta 1996. ISBN 0-7885-0177-1

Remarks

  1. ↑ Herman L. Pass; John Arendzen: Fragment of an Aramaic Text of the Testament of Levi. In: Jewish Quarterly Review 12 (1900), 651-661. Cf. also Wilhelm Bousset: An Aramaic fragment of the Testamentum Levi. In: Journal for New Testament Science 1 (1900), 344–346.
  2. ^ "Oriental manuscript, hardly later than the eleventh century". Passport; Arendzen: Fragment , 651f.
  3. ↑ The manuscript has been bearing since the critical edition of Robert Henry Charles: The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Edited from nine MSS together with the Variants of the Armenian and Slavonic Versions and some Hebrew Fragments. Oxford 1908 [reprint Darmstadt 1960] the Siglum e ; the signature is Athos Koutloumous 39; Catalog number 3108 in Spyridon P. Lambros: Catalog of the Greek Manuscripts on Mount Athos. 2 vol. Cambridge 1985-1900. There also a detailed description of the manuscript.
  4. ^ Robert Henry Charles ; Arthur Cowley: An Early Source of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In: Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1907), 566-583.
  5. ↑ See the considerations and helpful graphic overviews in Robert A. Kugler: From Patriarch to Priest. The Levi-Priestly Tradition from Aramaic Levi to Testament of Levi. Atlanta 1996, 231-233 and Jonas C. Greenfield; Michael E. Stone; Ester Eshel: The Aramaic Levi Document: Edition, Translation, Commentary. SVTP 19. Leiden u. a. 2004, 48-50.
  6. ↑ “[…] that the fragments belong to the earliest layer of Geniza material; in spite of the difficulty in dating the fragments due to the lack of comparative material, it seems to me [...] that they were written before 1000 [...] ”. Quoted in Jonas C. Greenfield; Michael E. Stone: Remarks on the Aramaic Testament of Levi from the Geniza. In: Revue Biblique 86 (1979), 214-230; here 216.
  7. ↑ Greenfield; Stone: Remarks.
  8. ↑ Émile Puech: Le Testament de Lévi en araméen de la Geniza du Caire. In: Revue de Qumran 20 (2002), 511-556; and Émile Puech: Le Testament de Lévi araméen, Cambridge a - b et f: Corrigenda et addenda. In: Revue de Qumran 23 (2008), 543-561.