A Palimpsest Fragment with Unattested Passages of Job 3:11c-4:3b in Christian Palestinian Aramaic under Sinai, Greek NF MG 14

Christa Müller-Kessler

doi:10.21071/cco.v17i0.1146

Abstract

This palimpsest fragment with unattested passages of Job 3:11c-4:3b in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic translation has been preserved in a Greek codex registered as Sinai, Greek NF MG 14 in the Monastery of St Catherine. The biblical text is one of the more than 160 palimpsests, which could be identified among the New Finds that were discovered in 1975 in a blocked-up chamber. With the help of the new technology of multispectral digital imaging it was possible to bring out the reading of the lower script for this Bible section. The unpublished text is edited here in transliteration and translation with commentaries on the variant witnesses.

Highlights

The Greek codex with the shelfmark Sinai, Greek NF MG 141 belonging to the New Finds of St Catherine‖s Monastery from 1975 assembles a collection of various palimpsest manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Greek overwritten by a Greek majuscule with the Saint‖s Lives from Encomium on the Theotokos.[2]
All three Bible manuscript witnesses in Christian Palestinian Aramaic can be clearly distinguished by their specific scribal hands, but their original place of writing cannot be established through the shape of the letters.[6]
The translations of the Job witnesses in Christian Palestinian Aramaic often correspond to other Greek Bible witnesses only found as additions in the margins in the Syrohexapla

Summary

Background

The Greek codex with the shelfmark Sinai, Greek NF MG 141 belonging to the New Finds of St Catherine‖s Monastery from 1975 assembles a collection of various palimpsest manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Greek overwritten by a Greek majuscule with the Saint‖s Lives from Encomium on the Theotokos.[2]. The translations of the Job witnesses in Christian Palestinian Aramaic often correspond to other Greek Bible witnesses only found as additions in the margins in the Syrohexapla. These early Job translations cannot have been influenced by the latter, since this dialect draws directly from a Greek Vorlage, which differs in the various biblical verses of Job. the text variants are compared here to the Syrohexapla as found in the only manuscript Milan, Ambrosiana, MS C 313 Inf.[11]. All new palimpsest texts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic of the early period (5th–6th centuries AD), especially Bible witnesses such as 1 Kingdoms, Proverbs, and Job add to our knowledge of the transmission of the Septuagint, their sources, and the dependent translations as well as the lexicography and the grammar. The two fragments with 1 Kingdoms 18:29b–30 show an addition as only attested in Lucian and Origen,[13] and they might have had the same translator as the Job fragment, but the manuscript was definitely copied by a different scribe

Codicological data

Orthographical and Linguistic Features

Transliteration and Translation