Donald Traxler's Poetry

Monday, July 18, 2022

The "Our Father" and What It Can Tell Us about the Gospels - Part II

The image above is a modification of one that I found on the internet, and I do not own any rights in it. It contains a descendant of the oldest Hebrew text of the Avinu ("Our Father") that we have, It corresponds to my Matthew IIb, and is from a text similar to that of Shem Tob's Hebrew Matthew, also preserved for us by the Jewish Rabbis. It is here written in Dead Sea Scrolls script, which is much the way it would have been written in the time of Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus).

In concluding Part I of this article, I indicated that there was much more that could be said on this subject. Indeed, there is, and I'll try to say it, or at least some of it, in this part.

Some of what remains to be said concerns the Aramaic version of this prayer, known as the "Abun," "Abwoon," or "Awoon," depending upon the dialect. It is important to remember, though, that Jewish Aramaic and Christian Aramaic (Syriac) are rather different. It is quite misleading to call Syriac (the language that Jesus spoke," as is often done by speakers and proponents of that language. Jesus (Rabbi Yeshua) was a Jew, and it is therefore logical to assume that he spoke Jewish Aramaic. It is also a fact that the Peshitta, the official Syriac text of the Bible, has been intentionally modified to bring it into closer harmony with the Greek textual tradition. In fact, an effort was made to suppress and destroy all earlier Biblical texts in Syriac. As usual though, they couldn't quite get all of them, and a couple of texts (Syr-s and Syr-c) did survive, and were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. For the purposes of this article, the relevant version is the version in standard Jewish Aramaic, covered in the previous part.

Some of the salient points are these:

1) The Aramaic version is the oldest. As a poet, I am certain that it is original and not a translation, since it employs literary devices such as rhyme and plays on words. It also reveals a structure that was partially lost in all succeeding versions.

2) The Aramaic version makes clear several points that were doubtful. For example, we needn't worry about whether "sins" or "debts" is correct: it should simply depend on the context, because in Aramaic the same word has both meanings.

3) What in Greek was "daily bread" was "our bread, which is from the earth" (give it to us day by day). This is part of an internal structure of the prayer, which contrasts the heavenly kingdom with life here on earth. The idiom used for "day by day" is literally "today and tomorrow," which is why St. Jerome, who apparently didn't know much Aramaic, thought the sense was "give us our bread of the morrow today."

4)The Aramaic original was translated into Hebrew in at least two different versions. In the earlier (Matthew IIb) one, the last line read "keep us (shomrenu) from all evil." But a later Hebrew version (Matthew III) read "deliver us (hatsilenu) from evil." It was from this later, fuller Hebrew text that our Greek Matthew was translated. This is proven by a misreading in the Greek text, a confusion between two very similar-appearing Hebrew words: hatsilenu "deliver us" and chaltsenu "draw us." The word that appears in our Greek text, "rhusai" is a translation of the latter, not the former.

(to be continued)

Sunday, July 17, 2022

The "Our Father" and What It Can Tell Us about the Gospels

The above image (which is a modification of one that I found on the internet, and I do not own any rights to it) contains the "Our Father" in standard Jewish Aramaic. It is written in Dead Sea Scrolls script, which is approximately the way it would have been written in the time of Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus).

I've written previously on this subject (see entries published in this blog on 30 May 2019, 24 July 2019, and 3,4,5 July 2020.

The "Our Father" ("Avinu" in Hebrew, "Abun" in Aramaic) is an ancient prayer, and it would have been first taught in Jewish Aramaic, not in Syriac. The prayer in the image above would sound like this:

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitkadesh sh'makh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re'utakh

heykhma d'bishmayya,

keyn af be'ar'a.

lachman d'me'ar'a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra.

ushbaq lan chobayn,

heykm d'af sh'baqnan l'chayyabayn.

ve al ta'eylan l'nisayuna,

ela atseylan min bisha.

This translates to:

Our Father in the heavens,

may your name be sanctified,

may your kingdom come,

may your will be done

as in the heavens

so also on earth.

Our bread, which is from the earth,

give us day by day.

Forgive us our sins,

as we also forgive those indebted to us.

And do not bring us to trial,

but deliver us from evil.

I am certain that this is the most original version that we have. It incorporates rhyme, which is an aid to memorization, as well as at least one play on words, a common feature of Semitic literature, and this one (ta'eylan/atseylan) works only in Aramaic.

At this point, I think I need to back up a bit. I was recently reading a Hebrew translation of this prayer (that of Salkinson). I compared the last line to the last line in Delitzsch's Hebrew translation, and I noticed a strange thing: where Salkinson had "hatsilenu," Delitzsch had "chaltsenu." What was going on here? Had Delitzsch made a mistake? Was he dyslexic?

What happened was this: Salkinson translated according to the well-known meaning, "deliver," and he used exactly the right Hebrew word (which happens also to be cognate with "atseylan" in Jewish Aramaic, so we know it's correct). Delitzsch, on the other hand, had slavishly followed the Greek, which is based on a confusion of two similar-appearing Hebrew words (hatsilenu הצילנו and chaltsenu חלצנו).

The word in the canonical, Greek text of Matthew is "rhusai" (from Strong #4506, rhuomai), a Greek word meaning "to draw off," here taken to mean "rescue" or "deliver." This word is based on a misreading of "hatsilenu" as "chaltsenu" in an unpointed Hebrew manuscript. The meaning of the second verb is, in fact, "to draw off." By following the Greek text so literally, Delitzsch reproduced the original error of the translator into Greek (or of a Hebrew copyist, it makes no difference), and thus brought the error, unnoticed for almost 2000 years, to our attention.

I consider this to be strong evidence, and perhaps even sufficient proof, that our canonical, Greek Matthew was translated into Greek from a Hebrew manuscript.

There is more that could be said about this prayer and what it can tell us. Let me know if you are interested. If so, I'll continue this article.