06-20-2008, 04:56 AM
Shalom~Shlama Yochanan,
Really the way I understand it, the Church of the East came out of the synagogues in Babylon and Adiabene, so we brought along with us the common "Targum" of that time and geographic location, and that was what is known today as the Peshitta Tanakh~OT. The reading of "Namusa" I gave you from Deut. is from the Peshitta Targum.
In Beth-Nahrin, the common language was Aramaic (eastern) and since the people needed the Tanakh in a language they could understand, the Peshitta OT was made from the same Hebrew original that also lay behind the Masoretic and Septuagint.
The Mandeans (a gnostic sect in southern Iraq) also speak Aramaic, and they use this word from the Greek. I think it happened to creep into the language during the reign of Alexander in Mesopotamia. So by the time Meshikha came it was centuries in common use as a loan-word originally of Greek origin. Its presence, again, does nothing to harm our Aramaic primacy position, since it was used in an Aramaic translation of a Hebrew original (Deuteronomy). That proves that "Namusa" was simply an Aramaicised Greek word in common use before NT times.
+Shamasha Paul
Really the way I understand it, the Church of the East came out of the synagogues in Babylon and Adiabene, so we brought along with us the common "Targum" of that time and geographic location, and that was what is known today as the Peshitta Tanakh~OT. The reading of "Namusa" I gave you from Deut. is from the Peshitta Targum.
In Beth-Nahrin, the common language was Aramaic (eastern) and since the people needed the Tanakh in a language they could understand, the Peshitta OT was made from the same Hebrew original that also lay behind the Masoretic and Septuagint.
The Mandeans (a gnostic sect in southern Iraq) also speak Aramaic, and they use this word from the Greek. I think it happened to creep into the language during the reign of Alexander in Mesopotamia. So by the time Meshikha came it was centuries in common use as a loan-word originally of Greek origin. Its presence, again, does nothing to harm our Aramaic primacy position, since it was used in an Aramaic translation of a Hebrew original (Deuteronomy). That proves that "Namusa" was simply an Aramaicised Greek word in common use before NT times.
+Shamasha Paul