The Aramaic of Qumran is sometimes claimed to be the best or only Aramaic dialect to use for understanding the Aramaic background of the New Testament. In fact, although it has its uses, the corpus of Qumran Aramaic is very small, and it is not a sufficient source on its own for the purposes of back-translating portions of the New Testament into “authentic” first-century c.e. Palestinian Aramaic. A consideration of the difficulties of retroversion when the translation technique of the Greek writer is unknown, combined with inadequate control of Aramaic among retroverters, suggests that largescale Aramaic retroversion of New Testament passages has no chance of reconstructing the original Aramaic of the Gospels.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
D. Biber, “Representativeness in Corpus Design,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 8 (1993): 243–57, esp. 243.
C. Stadel, Hebraismen in den aramäischen Texten vom Toten Meer (Schriften der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg 11; Heidelberg: Winter, 2008).
J. T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 5.
M. Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 225b s.v. טליה. Henceforth djpa.
E. W. Larson, “The Translation of Enoch: From Aramaic into Greek” (Ph. D. dissertation, New York University, 1995), 240; see also E. M. Cook, “Our Translated Tobit,” in Targumic and Cognate Studies: Essays in Honour of Martin McNamara (ed. K. Cathcart and M. Maher; jsotSup 230; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 153–62.
R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English: With Introductions and Critical and Explanatory Notes to the Several Books (2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 2:172. Henceforth apot.
J. H. Moulton and W. F. Howard, “Appendix: Semitisms in the New Testament,” in A Grammar of New Testament Greek, Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1929), 439.
E. Y. Kutscher, “The Language of the Genesis Apocryphon: A Preliminary Study,” in Aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Scripta Hierosolymitana 4; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1958), 1–35.
Chilton, Bock, and Gurtner, Handbook, 236. All of the retroversions in the book appear in the authors’ transliteration (or “vocalization,” as they call it).
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 461 | 97 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 237 | 3 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 78 | 10 | 0 |
The Aramaic of Qumran is sometimes claimed to be the best or only Aramaic dialect to use for understanding the Aramaic background of the New Testament. In fact, although it has its uses, the corpus of Qumran Aramaic is very small, and it is not a sufficient source on its own for the purposes of back-translating portions of the New Testament into “authentic” first-century c.e. Palestinian Aramaic. A consideration of the difficulties of retroversion when the translation technique of the Greek writer is unknown, combined with inadequate control of Aramaic among retroverters, suggests that largescale Aramaic retroversion of New Testament passages has no chance of reconstructing the original Aramaic of the Gospels.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 461 | 97 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 237 | 3 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 78 | 10 | 0 |