Вновь идентифицированные и неопубликованные фрагменты арабских версий Самаритянского Пятикнижия из собрания Российской национальной библиотеки - СПб. || The Recently Discovered and Other Unpublished Arabic Fragments of the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Collection of the Russian National Library - SPb. || Fragments inconnu [sic] et inédits des versions arabes du Pentateuque samaritain de la Bibliothèque Nationale du [sic] Russie - SPb.
edition published: 2019-10-21Z
availability: Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

Арутюн Жамкочян, Haroutun Jamgotchian, Вновь идентифицированные и неопубликованные фрагменты арабских версий Самаритянского Пятикнижия из собрания Российской национальной библиотеки - СПб. || The Recently Discovered and Other Unpublished Arabic Fragments of the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Collection of the Russian National Library - SPb. || Fragments inconnu [sic] et inédits des versions arabes du Pentateuque samaritain de la Bibliothèque Nationale du [sic] Russie - SPb., https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/YRQT8RMC, https://www.zotero.org/groups/biblia_arabica/items/YRQT8RMC, https://www.zotero.org/groups/538215/items/YRQT8RMC, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/48938661, Москва || Moscow, Паймс, 2001, For this monograph, Jamgotchian sumarizes and expands his previous findings among the Firkovich collection of the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg, concerning the Arabic translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Material from outside the Firkovich collection, too, is taken into account: Chapter 7 offers a useful and fairly complete list of manuscripts mentioned in scholarly literature, set in chronological order as far as their dating can be ascertained. Unlike Shehadeh (cf. https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/QEBUX9IC), the author groups the manuscripts according to typological features, based on the number of languages included (trilingual, bilingual or Arabic only) and the script in which the Arabic text is written (Samaritan or Arabic). Chapter 8 deals with the identification and description of manuscript fragments from the Firkovich collection, at first with those of section IIa (previously described by Harkavy, cf. https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/GJ2PTPI4) and of section IIb. The author applies to them the typology established in chapter 7, with the writing material (parchment or paper) also taken into account. Some of these fragments had already been identified as missing parts of incomplete codices in other libraries, and the author is able to suggest such allocations for the other fragments as well, whether to known codices or among each other, to form larger parts of codices that are lost or unspecified as yet. It turns out that all of these fragments belong to a total of thirteen parchment and (probably) four paper codices. In contrast to the fragment of section IIa and IIb, those from section III belong to the type which has the Arabic text only, written in Arabic characters. These can be matched together to form a total of eight otherwise unknown codices. However, not all of the matchings suggested in this chapter can be regarded as absolutely certain, as is pointed out by the author himself. In chapter 9, the author proceeds with a closer study of the Arabic texts of the fragments which chiefly consists of various observations on their orthographical and linguistic features, variant and common readings, scribal errors, and aspects of the translation technique. The author indicates that such findings might serve as criteria for the dating and localizing of the manuscripts. The book also includes a number of short and rather independant introductory chapters. While the content of chapters 1 to 4 is not immediately connected to the core topic, chapter 5 recapitulates the history of scholarship on Samaritan Arabic translations, and chapter 6, according to the title, presents their “principal versions”. As such, only the Samaritan adaptation of Saadiah’s translation, surviving in MS: London, British Library, Or. 7562, and Abū Saʿīd’s revision are mentioned (which leaves open the question of how the author views the non-Saadian Samaritan versions that are found in old manuscripts such as MS: Nablus, Samaritan Synagogue, 6). In his conclusion, the author tries to show which types of manuscripts (according to his typology) were prevalent at which period. As to the textual types, he states that the Samaritans of Egypt used a Saadianic text of Coptic provenance. Later, manuscripts with Abū Saʿīd’s revised text gained wide currency inside and outside of Egypt. On the other hand, the author expresses his disagreement with the division of the translation tradition into old and revised types, assuming a process of gradual textual modifcations instead. The appendices comprise an index of Arabic translations of personal names in the Samaritan Pentateuch, facsimile pictures of the St. Petersburg fragments, a republication of the author’s article on Yūsuf al-Maghribī (cf. https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/XTDQRLRZ) with minor modifications, an index of manuscripts studied in the book with their sigla (including the reconstructed new codices), a diagram showing the extant text of the St. Petersburg fragments in comparison to the lacunae of the other known MSS. It was the author’s intention to publish in a supplementary volume an edition of Numbers and Deuteronomy based upon the St. Petersburg fragments and previous editions, which has not been realized. Reviews have been written by Drozdík https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/XMA7WHIB and Reško https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/PLMFLN2Y. An excerpt of the codicological data in chapter 8 concerning section IIa of the Firkovich collection is given by Schwarb as an appendix to his article https://biblia-arabica.com/bibl/6VKB5WN8.

Жамкочян, Арутюн, and Haroutun Jamgotchian. Вновь идентифицированные и неопубликованные фрагменты арабских версий Самаритянского Пятикнижия из собрания Российской национальной библиотеки - СПб. || The Recently Discovered and Other Unpublished Arabic Fragments of the Samaritan Pentateuch from the Collection of the Russian National Library - SPb. || Fragments inconnu [sic] et inédits des versions arabes du Pentateuque samaritain de la Bibliothèque Nationale du [sic] Russie - SPb. Москва || Moscow: Паймс, 2001.