Devotional Short Note to Psalm 72  What did the Syriac translation do with the Psalm?

In this Psalm, it may serve us well to reflect on the Syriac Translation of this Psalm. When I was working with the texts in Daniel, I became convinced at Daniel 2:34 that there is a stronger link between the Syriac and the Old Latin (190 A.D.) than between the Syriac and Theodotion (190 A.D.). A misreading in the Old Latin was shared by the Syriac. What I also found is that the scribe of the Syriac read his text with the same constraints that one finds in Qumran texts. Some errors are the same and some are different.

It is claimed that the Syriac translation was made in the second century A.D. but there is no evidence for this. The earliest manuscripts surviving dated to 459/460 A.D. or mostly for the Leiden Peshitta Project from the sixth to the twelfth centuries A.D. One of my three professors in Syriac, Johann Erbes, who did not teach me Syriac but Septuagint and Aramaic, also worked with the earliest manuscript of Joshua as from the sixth century A.D.

When we were students, everyone was scared of the linguists: Johann Erbes and Leonna Running. So I took by her permission, Syriac with Leonna Running. She was William Foxwell Albright’s research and editiorial assistant for many years at John Hopkins. She pointed out the typographical errors in the Syriac Grammar book by Theodore H. Robinson.

Our classes met Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays between 10h30 and 11h30. She told us that she went to Beirut and saw “Coca-Cola” spelled as “Cuca-Cula”. It is because Arabic has no /ō/ only /u/.

She said one day in class “Doing collation [of a Syriac manuscript] suddenly makes you feel you look into the brain of somebody who has been dead for a long time”. She said that the alaph in Estrangela looked like a grasshopper to me and when she came to the tsadhe, she giggled and said “You’ve got a real snake in the Estrangela”.

Albright would sometimes come to her and asked her to make a proper ayin, since she could not make a proper one with the typewriter, she struggled with this one. I took her Syriac Grammar book one day and copied all the errors that she saw in the Grammar book from page 5 to 156, a total of 25 errors.

Once we were reading the book of Isaiah in Syriac and she was explaining the translation and grammar when her eyes slipped passed the Syriac letters to her fingernails that had white paint on it from doing some painting the previous day. She started scratching the paint off while reading the Syriac!

The last time I contacted her she was 93. Rest until Christ comes soon. At last I came to the Syriac biblical text and for pastors who wish to see the translation, download the Translation by George M. Lamsa in English. For the Syriac text I am using the Lee’s Edition of 1823(?) which his based on the London Polyglot and published by the United Bible Societies 1979. If your nearest Library has any copies from the Leiden Peshitta Project on this Psalm, you should use that.

The last line, verse 20, is in the Hebrew text but left out of the Syriac text. Rabbi Rashi of the Middle Ages conjectured that the sentence “the prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended” simply means that it is David’s last prayer that he wrote after he gave the power over to Solomon, which in my calculation was in 974 BCE. Edwin Thiele had it in 970 A.D. I have William Shea on my side and Thiele has Douglas Waterhouse and Siegfried Horn on his and of course the support of conventionalism.

The first thing the Syriac translation teaches us, is that all the verbs need to be translated as futures. David pleads from God the judgments of God for himself and God’s Righteousness for Solomon (72:1). The future eschatology is outlined saying “the mountains shall bring peace to [Your] people and the hills [Your] righteousness”. In […] is indicated the new additions in the Syriac.

In 72:5 the Syriac changed the Hebrew text by reading “they shall revere You with a sun and before a moon throughout to generations” which the original of David read as “they shall fear You with a sun and before a moon throughout generation of generations”. A slight shortening of the text at the end.

The Syriac changed the Hebrew text in 72:7 where a Phoenician negative particle “no” is used [baly] and left it out of the translation. The Syriac read “In his days shall the righteous flourish and abundance of peace so long as the moon endures”. The original of David read however “In his days shall the righteous flourish and abundance of peace until the moon be not”. The negative fell out of the Syriac translation. It is a bit of sloppiness on the part of the Syriac translators since one has to be as literal as possible always.

In 72:9 one word ציים = ṣyym is an educated guess by scholars since it is based on Arabic meanings and thus translated in our modern translations with the Arabic meaning in mind. They translated the word as “wilderness” or “dry place” derived from the Arabic of the seven century A.D. that way. The Hebrew dictionaries also advised this reading. If it was properly understood, the Syriac would have used the same form of letters as the Hebrew or Arabic meaning, since the word “wilderness” does exist in the same form in the Syriac Dictionary as used in Leviticus 20. But, not so. The Syriac used another word format to translate rather “islands”. Why? It is because of bad handwriting or slip of the hand in the Hebrew original that the Syriac translators were using. Scribbled, the aleph and the tsade looks the same. “Islands” in Hebrew is identical to this word except an aleph is used and in fact, “islands” is  used in the next verse 72:10, `yym instead of ṣyym. The Hebrew text that the Syriac translators used was in a bad shape due to bookburning practices in those days, Romans stealing libraries, so good copies of the Old Testament were almost unavailable. We must remember that around 250 A.D. Origen wrote to churchfather Africanus and said that “the church should reject their copies and put away the sacred books among them, and flatter the Jews, and persuade them to give [us] copies that are untampered with, and free from forgery = ut nos puris et qui nihil habeant figment, impertiant” as PG 11:40-41 tells us.

As to the meaning of the word ṣyym, the Late Egyptian is going to help us out here again: simu is the word “field of garden produce, herbs and vegetables”. It was that way also in the Coptic. It means the word form and meaning had a long history. Translate then David as “Before You they shall bow, the vegetable gardeners and His enemies shall lick dust”.

In 72:10 the Syriac added twice a preposition with the third person singular “to him”. “The Kings of Tarshish and of the islands shall bring presents [to him]” There is no letter misreading here to explain this addition in the Syriac. Some scholars saw a link between the Syriac and Targum in general so one can wonder what the Targum would read here whether they also share this addition between the two translations?

So finally, what can we conclude about the Syriac translation of the Old Testament? There are sometimes plusses and minuses and these are due to difficult times when it was not easy to procure a good Hebrew original that was copied with care and accurately. The manuscripts were of a degenerative kind just like those at Qumran. In fact, two scholars Penna and Goshen-Gottstein found in the past that Qumran, Vulgate, Targum, Syriac and Greek of the byzantine period sometimes share the errors at the same spots. It means that the Roman persecutions of Jews and Christians led to the disappearance and hiding of copies of the Old Testament and those eager to translate had to be content with what was available. Secondary quality was at the order of the day.

The Holy Spirit preserved for us the Word of God in its exact form for the Old Testament in two or more full copies existing from the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. How do we know they are not also error infected? Reason: if one test this document with Daniel from Cave four of Qumran, they are 99.99% identical! More than a millennium between the texts. What a marvelous miraculous record of accuracy.