Following the Footnotes: The Syriac Bible

For the final instalment of our Following the Footnotes series, Peter Williams explains why Bible translators today sometimes refer to the Syriac version in footnotes.

If you open a modern Bible like the English Standard Version (ESV) or the New International Version (NIV), you will find references in the footnotes to something called the Syriac. Each of these versions has over 100 such references, all appearing in the Old Testament. These references are to one of the earliest translations of the Old Testament known as the Syriac Peshitta. ‘Peshitta’ probably means ‘simple’ or ‘common’ and refers to the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into the form of Eastern Aramaic known as Syriac. Besides this version, there were also several Syriac versions of much or all of the New Testament.

Though Syriac might seem an obscure area of knowledge to many today, it is actually one of the most significant languages for church history. Just as Latin became important for the church in North Africa, and western and northern Europe, so Syriac was used in churches east of the Holy Land, and Syriac-speaking missionaries made it as far as China. There is a famous inscription from AD 781 in China, which has writing in both Chinese and Syriac, explaining how in AD 635 the Chinese Emperor recognised the Church of the East.

Syriac is still used as a liturgical language in churches in countries including India and Lebanon. The Syriac translations also play an important part in the historical awareness of modern Aramaic speakers, of whom there may be over 500,000 alive today. Though modern and ancient Aramaic are rather different, modern Aramaic speakers in the Middle East, and in the western diaspora, often feel a historical connection to the Syriac Bible.

Syriac also occupies a remarkable space because, although it’s Eastern Aramaic, it’s probably not much more different from the Western Aramaic of Jesus than American English is from British English. Jesus’s sayings such as Talitha kum (Mark 5:41) or Ephphatha (Mark 7:34) would have been intelligible to a Syriac speaker. Syriac is also a cousin of Hebrew, rather like Spanish and Italian are cousin languages.

The Syriac Old Testament is a very old translation from the Hebrew. Only the early Greek translations of the Old Testament and a single translation of the book of Job into Aramaic found among the Dead Sea Scrolls are older.

The translation of most of the Old Testament books is typically dated to the second century AD. Scholars debate whether the translation was produced by Jews or rather a group transitioning from Judaism to Christianity, but the translators certainly knew Hebrew well.

So why would Bible translations today refer to the Syriac?

Not only is it one of the earliest translations of the Old Testament, but its linguistic closeness to the Hebrew makes it very useful for working out the meanings of obscure Hebrew words. Also, though our Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament have been handed down with extraordinary fidelity, most of the manuscripts we have are late. The earliest complete copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew is the Leningrad Codex from AD 1008. By contrast, the earliest complete copy of the Old Testament Peshitta, Codex Ambrosianus, comes from around the seventh century AD. And the manuscript known as British Library Add. 14425, which only contains the Syriac Pentateuch (excluding Leviticus), has a specific date on it telling us it comes from AD 463 or 464.

Whenever we have a textual difficulty in the Hebrew—either something we don’t understand or where early manuscript witnesses differ—it’s useful to look at early translations to see what they say. They aren’t perfect, but they are like time capsules showing how people closer to the Bible’s origins understood the text.

I did my doctoral work on the Syriac Old Testament and came to appreciate the incredible care which went into this translation. But I also came to think that the Syriac translation was rather better at telling us how the translators understood the Hebrew than being used to correct the Hebrew.

I will give a couple of examples. In Genesis 4:8 we read in the ESV, ‘Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.’ But the NIV reads, ‘Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” While they were in the field Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.’

The chief difference between these translations is that the NIV gives Cain’s words, while the ESV does not. The ESV doesn’t show the difficulty in the Hebrew that the word translated ‘spoke’ is much more like our English verb ‘said’ and is almost always followed by speech.

The two English translations take differing views on a textual debate that has been around since before the time of the New Testament. In the version of the Hebrew Torah preserved by the Samaritans, Genesis 4:8 has two words more than the Hebrew Masoretic text. These two words lie behind the NIV’s ‘Let’s go out to the field.’

The earliest Greek translation of Genesis seems to reflect these same two words in its four-word translation, ‘Let’s go into the field’ (dielthōmen eis to pedion). Both the ESV and the NIV give us a footnote at this point highlighting that, not only do the Samaritan and the Septuagint support the extra words, but so does the Syriac. But that’s not quite correct. Yes, the Syriac has extra words, but it does not say ‘Let’s go into the field,’ but rather ‘Let’s travel to the plain.’

This is interesting because it actually shows how the Syriac supports both sides—the Samaritan or Greek with their extra words, and the Hebrew Masoretic text without them.

This is how.

The phrase ‘Let us travel to the plain’ cannot be a direct translation of the Hebrew in the Samaritan version. But it is a correct translation of the Greek since the Greek word dielthōmen can mean ‘travel’ and pedion can mean both a field and a plain.

So the Samaritan Torah adds ‘Let us go to the field,’ and the Syriac adds ‘Let us travel to the plain.’ The reason they differ in nuance is because the Syriac has come two steps via another language, namely Greek. It appears, then, that those who translated the Old Testament into Syriac generally used the Jewish Hebrew text, but might have occasionally looked over at the Greek when they had questions about the Hebrew. So the Syriac both attests the addition of the words and recognises that the Hebrew omits them at the same time!

The same could also be the case in another example.

In Exodus 14:25, we have a passage about Pharaoh’s chariots getting into trouble as they chase after the Israelites. The ESV refers to God ‘clogging their chariot wheels’, while the NIV similarly says, ‘He jammed the wheels of their chariots’. Both English translations note the Syriac, along with the Samaritan and the Greek as authorities for this translation, and note that the Hebrew Masoretic text has ‘removed’ (NIV) or ‘removing’ (ESV).

The difference between these two translations just appears to be one Hebrew letter:

• The Masoretic text has ויסר (traditionally ‘he removed’).
• The Samaritan version has ויאסר (traditionally ‘he bound’).

So the only difference appears to be the presence or absence of the Hebrew letter aleph (א). But here we have a complication: the Hebrew letter aleph, which corresponds to a glottal stop (the sound made in the middle of the exclamation ‘uh-oh’, which modern phonetics transcribes as [ʌʔoʊ]), is one of the weakest of all Hebrew sounds. It’s prone to drop out of words, so we cannot exclude the possibility that the consonants of the Masoretic Hebrew reflect the same understanding as the Samaritan.

At this point we know how the Syriac translators understood the passage – as clogging the wheels – but we don’t know what text or texts they had in front of them to translate. Perhaps it was the Hebrew version without a written aleph, but they understood it as if it had an aleph. Or perhaps they had a Greek translation which they consulted.

The English translations do us a service in pointing out that early authorities understand that God clogged or bound the wheels of the Egyptians, but they should not be used to imply that the traditional Hebrew text without the aleph was incorrect.

To conclude, the Syriac is one of the most important translations of the Old Testament. Because it covers the entire Old Testament it give us an insight into every word. On the whole it supports the traditional Hebrew Masoretic text. Even when it appears to differ, it may differ less than it seems at first appearance. Its greatest value is in showing us how one of the earliest groups of translators we know understood the Old Testament.