Aramaic in Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity.

• Author: Cassis, Marjca
• Position: Book review

Aramaic in Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity. Edited by ERIC M. MEYERS and PAUL V. M. FLESHER. Duke Judaic Studies Series, vol. 3. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 2010. Pp. xx + 300. $49.50.

Working as I do on late antique and early medieval communities in the Near East, I am always surprised at how little attention Aramaic receives in scholarship. The undergraduates I teach also have very little knowledge of it (if any), and, as the editors of this collection comment, "... outside of the Jewish seminaries and a few elite graduate programs, the majority of... students never get beyond [a basic] introduction" (p. xiv). Yet Aramaic in its various iterations was long the literary (and spoken) language for various Jewish and Christian communities in the Near East. In Aramaic in Postbiblical Judaism and Early Christianity, editors Eric M. Myers and Paul V. M. Flesher present a series of essays that originated in a six-week 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar at Duke University, which was designed to allow scholars in various connected fields further scope to expand their knowledge of Aramaic (p. xiv). Although the articles in this volume range across a cross-section of scholarship--and thus will individually appeal to different types of expertise--they ultimately all advocate through example for further scholarship in Aramaic.

The book is organized around three themes. Of the three chapters, the first group of essays ("Awakening Sleeping Texts") was the most accessible to me as a historian. The chapter focuses on the reconsideration of texts that are relatively unknown within the corpus of Aramaic and Syriac writings. In the first of these, "Reconsidering the Letter of Mara bar Serapion" (pp. 3-21), David Rensberger focuses on an (until recently) little-known Syriac letter between a pagan father and son that he argues is an important Late Antique example of "the Greco-Roman encounter with Western Asia" (p. 4). Sigrid Peterson, in "'Transgressive': Meaning and Implications of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ('wl') in Jewish Syriac Text and Translation" (pp. 23-32), contends that the definition of the term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. in the Syriac versions of the Psalms of Solomon and Sixth Maccabees should be rendered in English as 'transgressive', as opposed to 'lawless', as it more accurately reflects the notion of being outside Jewish law.

Michael Penn's excellent article, "The Composition of the Qenneshre...