Wednesday, October 19, 2022

A Matter of Trees - III

What we can be fairly certain of is that the translators of the OT part of the Peshitta, in the second century CE, had no referents for the Hebrew words תוהר and תאשוּר. The same was apparently true of the legendary "Seventy" translators of the Septuagint (LXX), in about 200 BCE. If Isaiah was written ca. 720-700 BCE, then it only took at most 500 years for these two tree names to be lost.

This being the case, how did the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls determine the meaning of תוהר to be "yew?" I suspect that they found a tree name with some phonetic similarity in a closely related Semitic language, such as Aramaic or Arabic. So, what is the word for "yew" in Arabic? It is "taqsus." Same initial consonant, vowel shifts between "a" and "o" are common, and the second consonant is, in both cases, a guttural. Don't ask me about the "-sus" part--I don't know what it means. Not proof, of course, but it's a distinct possibility. What word is used in Modern Hebrew for "yew?" Taqsus. The original, Hebrew word, has been lost.

A word for which there was a current need would probably not have been lost. But the yew may have been felled to extinction in that area. I can think of two possible reasons: 1) to make longbows, and 2) to avoid the poisoning of livestock in the course of grazing. Every part of the yew is poisonous.

"Taxus" is, of course, the Latin word for "yew," so who knows?

The second mystery tree name, תאשור, looks to me like a corruption of the Aramaic for "of Assyria." If there was a tree that was called "Assyrian," the knowledge of which tree it was had apparently been lost before the time of the translators of the Peshitta (second century CE), and even before the time of the "Seventy" (second century BCE. In other words, this knowledge had already been lost 1000 years before our oldest manuscript of the Masoretic Text. This, I think, puts Bible translation, especially of the Old Testament, in its proper perspective.

[Note on the illustration: The graphic shows verses 12-27 of Chapter 41 of Isaiah. The text is in the beautiful Estrangelo script, which began to be used for Aramaic in the first century CE. Verse 19 is exactly the same as I have given in Part II of this series, in the Hebrew letters that are in use today.]

A Matter of Trees - II

I began to make progress when I was reading THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS BIBLE: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English, by Martin Abegg, Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich (New York, Harper One, 1999) On page 336 I found this note: "820. 1QIsa-a and MT have different spellings of this obscure tree." Checking my Tanakh, I saw that the MT had תִּדְהָר (tid'har), while the DSS had תוהר (probably tohar or tuhar, while there are other possibilities in an unpointed txt such as this). But there is no known tree called "tid'har." Clearly, what has happened is that the Masoretes mistook a vav for a daleth.

Obviously, I was not privy to the deliberations of the DSS translators when they decided that the meaning of the DSS word (which I have underlined above in red) was "yew." Perhaps they found the word in an Aramaic targum, or in a text in another closely related language, With this thought in mind, I looked up Isaiah 41:19 in the Peshitta. Here t is:

אתל במדברא ארזא ואשכרעא ואסא וקיסא דמשחא אסים בפקעתא שרוינא הדירא אכחדא

Surely, I thought, this text, in a closely related language, translated from the Hebrew in the second century CE, would solve the problem of the mystery tree. But no, here it is in English:

I will give in the wilderness cedars and acacia trees and the myrtle and the tree of oil I will put in the plain cypresses glorious, together.

Those who are attentive will notice that there are only five tree names given. The translators of the Peshitta punted, and glossed two unfamiliar names of trees with the word "glorious."

(to be continued)