Und das Leben ist siegreich!: Mandaische und samaritanische Literature.

• Author: Haberl, Charles G.
• Position: Book review

Und das Leben ist siegreich!: Mandaische und samaritanische Literature. Edited by RAINER VOIGT. Mandaistische Forschungen, vol. 1. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2008. Pp. 286. [euro]68.

This much anticipated volume, the first in Harrassowitz's new Mandaeological series Mandaistische Forschungen, (1) contains the proceedings of the 1st Conference of Mandaic and Samaritan Studies, in memory of Rudolf Macuch, the premier scholar of the Mandaic language during the latter half of the twentieth century and one of the leading Aramaicists of his time. Fittingly, the conference took place in 2003, a decade after his death in 1993, and was hosted by the Seminar fur Semitistik and Arabistik of the Freie Universitat Berlin, which was home to Macuch for a quarter of a century.

While linguists and scholars of Middle East languages and literatures, both ancient and modern, owe Macuch a great debt of gratitude for his many contributions in diverse areas, it is undeniable that he made the greatest impact upon Mandaean and Samaritan studies, (2) and so it was also fitting that the conference be dedicated to these subjects, allowing some of his most prominent colleagues and students to discuss the present state of affairs in them.

In addition to the preliminary matter, the volume contains six scholarly contributions on the Samaritans and fourteen on the Mandaeans. In the preliminary matter., Maria Macuch, the Iranist and leading authority in the field of Sasanian jurisprudence, contributed a personal and extremely touching biography of her father, who otherwise might appear somewhat intimidating and impersonal to those who are familiar with his scholarship but who did not have the privilege of his acquaintanceship. Although brief, Macuch fille's contribution is one of the highlights of the volume. In a similar vein, Sabih Also-hairy contributes a brief resume of Macuch's academic contributions, in this instance from the perspective of a colleague and friend, and Kurt Rudolf, Macuch's longstanding colleague and collaborator, offers a few remarks on the status of the Mandaean community today, in the aftermath of Macuch's fieldwork and considerable change in the regions where they reside.

Jorunn J. Buckley delves into one of the more controversial issues within Mandaean studies in her contribution, "Once More: Mandaean Origins and Earliest History," which reviews much of the scholarship (recent and otherwise) on the question of Mandaean origins before arguing on the basis of the Mandaean evidence that the search for Gnostic origins include geographic areas further to the east that have been neglected by recent approaches. She concludes that Mandaean origins might be sought within Mesopotamian Jewish circles during the first century C.E. but that the Mandaic manuscript Inner Haran may also preserve a tradition of their flight from Palestine via the Wadi Hauran, which begins in eastern Jordan and feeds into the Tigris. Her contribution, which derives from her research on Mandaean colophons, (3) is also unique among the collected papers in that it includes three previously unpublished color images of the Mandaean community in Iran.

"The Mandaeans and the Myth of Their Origins" is also the...