A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts II (cont.)
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According to some writers Christianity formed the
intermediary stage by which Aquila passed from
paganism to Judaism. This would be a very natural
process. But the matter, as represented by some
Fathers of the Church, is not very flattering to
Judaism. Their story is somewhat as follows:
Aquila, abiding in Jerusalem, by the order of the
Emperor, and seeing there the disciples of the Apostles
flourishing in the faith, and doing great signs in heal-
ing and other wonders, became so deeply impressed
therewith that he soon embraced the Christian faith.
After some time he claimed the "seal in Christ," and
obtained it. But he did not turn away from his former
habit of believing, ---- to wit, in vain astronomy, of which
he was an expert, ---- but would be casting the horo-
scope of his nativity every day, wherefore he was re-
proved and unbraided by the disciples. However, he
would not mend, but would obstinately oppose to them
false and incoherent arguments, such as fate and
matters therewith connected; so he was expelled
from the Church as one unfit for salvation. Sorely
vexed at being dishonoured in this way, his mind was
goaded by wanton pride, and he abjured Christianity
and Christian life, became a Jewish proselyte, and was
circumcised.
The best historians, however, give preference to
the Jewish account, which tells us nothing about
Aquila's Christian days. In this he figures as Akylas
the proselyte, the disciple of R. Eliezer and R. Joshua.
With the former he is said to have had a rather bad
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encounter. Perusing the passage in the Scripture,
"For the Lord your God ... he does execute the
judgment of the fatherless and the widow, and loveth
the stranger (Ger) in giving him food and raiment"
(Deut. 10: 17-18), Aquila exclaimed: "So, that is all
which God has in store for the Ger? How many
pheasants and peacocks have I which even my slaves
refuse to taste" (so satiated are they with delicacies)?
To be sure, modest wants and frugal habits are no
great recommendation for a religion. At least, it can-
not under such circumstances aspire to the dignity of
the church of a gentleman. R. Eliezer resented this
worldliness in his pupil, and rebuked him with the
words: "Dost thou, Ger, speak so slightingly of the
things for which the patriarch (Jacob) prayed so
fervently?" (Gen 33:20). This harshness of R.
Eliezer, we are told, nearly led to a relapse of the
proselyte. He found, however, a more patient listen-
er in the meek and gentle R. Joshua, who by his
sympathetic answer reconciled him to his new faith.
The work which brought Aquila's name to pos-
terity is in his Greek version of the Old Testament,
which he undertook because he found the text of the
Septuagint greatly disfigured, both by wilful inter-
polations and by blundering ignorance. It was pre-
pared under the direction of the two Rabbis just men-
tioned (R. Eliezer and R. Joshua) and their fellow-
disciple R. Akiba. The main feature of Aquila's ver-
sion is an exaggerated literalism, which, as one may
imagine, often does violence to the Greek. It is
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such awkward Greek that, as somebody has said, it
is almost good Hebrew. The alternative which lay
before Aquila was, as it seems, between awkward
Greek and bad and false renderings, and he decided
for the former. One of the Church Fathers, when
alluding to this version, says: "Thereupon (after his
conversion to Judaism) he devoted himself most
assiduously to the study of the Hebrew tongue and
the elements thereof, and when he had completely
mastered the same, he set to interpreting (the Scrip-
tures), not of honest purpose, but in order to pervert
certain sayings of Scriptures, hurling his attacks against
the version of the seventy-two interpreters, whith a
view to giving a different rendering to those things
which are testified of Christ in the Scriptures."
Now, so far as one can judge from the little
retained to us his version, Aquila's perverting
activity did not go much farther than that which
engaged the Revision Committee for many years, who
also gave different renderings, at least in the margin,
to the so-called Christological passages. It is true
that Jews prefered his version to the Septuagint,
which at that time became the playground of theolo-
gians, who deduced from it all sorts of possible and
impossible doctrines, not only by means of interpreta-
tion, but also by actual meddling with the text. One
has only to read with some attention the Pauline
Epistles to see with what excessive freedom Scriptural
texts were handled when the severest rules exegesis
were abandoned. Some modern divenes even exalt
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these misquotations and wrong translations as the
highest goal of Christian liberty, which is above such
paltry, slavish considerations as exactness and accu-
racy. Aquila's version may thus have interfered with
theological liberty. But there is no real evidence that
he entered upon his work in a controversial spirit.
His undertaking was probably actuated by purely
scholarly motives. As a fact, the most learned of the
Church Fathers (e. g. St. Jerome) praise it often as a
thorough and exact piece of work. As the Rabbis,
tradition records, that when Aquila put his version
before his Jewish masters, they were so delighted with
it that they applied to it the verse in Psalms: "Thou
art fairer than the children of men, grace is poured in
thy lips (45: 3)." The Rabbis were, indeed, not
entirely insensible to the grace of the Greek language,
and they interpreted the verse in Genesis 9: 27, to
mean that the beauty of Japeth (the type of Greece),
which is so much displayed in his language, shall by
the fact that the Torah will be rendered into the Greek
tongue, find access to the tents (or synagogues) of
Shem (represented by Israel.) In the case of Aquila,
however, the grace admired in his version was, one
must assume, the grace of truth. To the grace of an
elegant style and fluent diction, as we have seen, it
can lay no claim.
For most of our knowledge of Aquila we are
indebted to Origen. We know his amiable weakness
for universal salvation. He thought not even the
devil beyond the possibility of repentance. Accord-
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ingly, he saved the "Jewish proselyte" from oblivion
by inserting several of his renderings in his famous
Hexapla, which, however, has come down to us in a
wrecked and fragmentary state. The Aquila frag-
ments discovered in the Genizah represent, in some
cases, Piyutim, in others, the Talmud of Jerusalem,
and the Greek under them is written in unicals, stated
by specialists to date from the beginning of the sixth
century. They are the first continuous pieces coming,
not through the medium of quotations, but directly
from Aquila's work, and must once have formed a
portion of a Bible used in some Hellenistic Jewish
synagogue for the purpose of public reading. The
Tetragrammation is neither translated nor transcribed,
but written in the archaic Hebrew characters found in the
Siloam inscription. Considering that Aquila's
version is so literal that the original is always trans-
parently visible through it, these fragments will prove
an important contribution to our knowledge of the
state of the Hebrew text during the first centuries of
our era, and of the mode of its interpretation. A part
of these fragments have been already edited in various
publications, by Dr C. Taylor, the Master of St.
John's College, and Mr. Burkitt, the fortunate dis-
coverer of the first Aquila leaf. But more leaves
have since come to light, which will be edited in course
of time.
To return to the liturgical fragments found in the
Genizah. Under this head may be included the di-
dactic poetry of the synagogue. It is a peculiar mix-
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ture of devotional passages and short epigrammatic
sentences, representing, to a certain extent, the Wis-
dom literature of the Synagogue in the Middle Ages.
Sometimes they are written, not unlike the Book of
Proverbs in the old Bible manuscripts, in two cloumns,
each column giving a hemistich. The examination of
this class of fragments requires great caution and close
attention, not so much on account of their own merits
as because of their strong resemblance to Ecclesias-
ticus both in form and in matter. You dare not neg-
lect the former lest some piece of the latter escape
you. The identification of the Ecclesiasticus frag-
ments is, indeed, a very arduous task, since our knowl-
edge of this apocryphon has been till now attainable
only through its Greek or Syriac disguise, which
amounts sometimes to a mere defaced caricature of
the real work of Sirach. But I hardly need to point
out that the recovery of even the smallest scrap of
the original Hebrew compensates richly for all the
labor spent on it. Apart from its semi-sacred char-
acter, these Sirach discoveries restore to us the only
genuine document dating from the Persian-Greek
period (from about 450 till about 160 B.C.E.), the
most obscure in the whole of Jewish history. And I
am strongly convinced that with all his "Jewish
prejudices" he will prove a safer guide in this laby-
rinth of guesses and counter-guesses than liberal-
minded "backward prophet" of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, whose source of inspiration is not always above
doubt.3 I am happy to state that my labours in this
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department were rewarded with several discoveries of
fragments from Sirach's "Wisdom Book." They will
soon be submitted to the necessary study preceding
their preparation for the press, when they will appear
in a separate volume.
The Rabbinic productions of the earlier sages,
teachers, and interpreters, as they are embodied in the
Mishnah, the Additions, and the Talmud of Jerusalem
and the Talmud of Babylon, formed the main subjects
of study in the mediæval schools of the Jews. it is
thus only natural that the Genizah should yield a
large number of fragments of the works mentioned,
and they do, indeed, amount to many hundreds.
Some of these are provided with vowel-points, and
occasionally also with accents, and thus represent a
family of manuscripts hitherto known only through
the evidence of certain authorities testifying to the fact
that there existed copies of early Rabbinic works
prepared in the way indicated. But what the student
is especially looking out for is for remainders of the
Talmud of Jerusalem, which, though in some respects
more important for the knowledge of Jewish history
and the intelligent conception of the minds of
the Rabbis than the "twin-Talmud of the East,"
has been, by certain untoward circumstances, badly
neglected in the schools, and thus very little copied
by the scribes. Its real importance and superi-
ority above similar contemporary productions was
only recognized in the comparatively modern centu-
ries, when the manuscripts, as just indicated never
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very ample, had long disappeared. The Genizah opens
a new mine in this direction, too, and the number of
fragments of the Jerusalem Talmud increasing daily,
also amounting to a goodly volume, will doubtless
be published by some student in due time.
Where the Genizah promises the largest output is
in the department of history, especially the period
intervening between the birth of Saadya (892) and
the death of Maimonides (1205). This period, which
gave birth to the greatest of the Eminences (Gaonim),
Rabbi Saadya, Rabbi Sherira, and Rabbi Hai, which
witnessed the hottest controversies beteen the Rab-
binites and the Karaites and other schismatics, and
which saw the disintegration of the great old schools
in Babylon, and the creation of new centres for the
study of the Torah in Europe and in North Africa,
forms, as is well known, one of the most important
chapters in Jewish history. But this chapter will now
have to be re-written; any number of conveyances,
leases, bills, and private letters are constantly turning
up, thus affording us a better insight into the social
life of the Jews during those remote centuries. New
letters from the Eminences addressed to their contem-
poraries, scattered over various countries, are daily
coming to light, and will form an important addition
to the Responsa literature of the Gaonim. Even entire
new books or fragments of such, composed by the
Gaonim, and only known by refrences have been
discovered. Of more significance are such documents
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as those bearing the controversy between Rabbi
Saadya and his contemporary Ben Meïr, the head of
the Jews in palestine, which prove that even at
that time the question of authority over the whole of
Jewry, and of the prerogative of fixing the calendar,
was still a contested point between the Jews of Pales-
tine and their brethren in the dispersion. The con-
troversy was a bitter one and of long duration, as
may be seen from another document dating from the
Eleventh Century, the Scroll of Abiathar, which, at
the same time reveals the significant fact that the
antagonism between the Priestly and Kingly, or
the Aaronide and Davidic families, had not quite died
down even at this late period. Some of the docu-
ments are autograph. It is enough to mention here
the letter of Chushiel ben Elhanan (or Hananel)
of Kairowan, addressed to Shemariah ben Elhanan
of Egypt, written about the year 1000. To these two
Rabbis, legend attributes a large share in the trans-
planting of the Torah in North Africa, so that our
document will prove an important contribution to
the history of the rise of the Yeshiboth outside of
Babylon.
Looking over this enormous mass of fragments
about me, in the shifting and examination of which I
am now occupied, I cannot overcome a sad feeling steal-
ing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the
results which the genizah will add to our knowledge
of Jews and Judaism. The work is not for one man
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and not for one generation. It will occupy many a
specialist, and much longer than a lifetime. How-
ever, to use an old adage, "It is not thy duty to com-
plete the work, but neither art thou free to desist
from it."
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