Word play in aramaic and syriac

[SteveCaruso]

Are you seriously suggesting that an Aramaic scribe took the liberty, when translating the alleged Greek from James, chose Shayna for one instance of eyrene, and Shlama for the same exact Greek word, a few words later?

Are you saying that scribes do not take liberties? <!-- s:eh: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/eh.gif" alt=":eh:" title="Eh" /><!-- s:eh: --> Especially between languages? <!-- satisfied: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/satisfied.gif" alt="atisfied:" title="Satisfied" /><!-- satisfied: --> Come, Paul, you speak more than one language and know far better than that. Maurice Casey spent a number of pages in his "Aramaic Approach to..." series dedicated to examples of how scribes translate things between languages taking such "liberties." You can easily look that up on your own time.

And, in doing so, coincidentally created not only a pun on "seed" and "cultivated land", but also a Janus Parallelism that didn't exist in the source text he was translating?

Wow. I see how this works. You can hypothesize a wordplay that doesn't exist in any text of the NT, yet when one is actually found in the text itself that stares you in the face, you can explain it away as the liberty a "Syriac scribe" took while translating from the Greek. Throw around the term "Shibboleth" and basically continue in your cognitive dissonance. IC. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

I have used shibboleth correctly, but everyone nowadays also seems to be throwing around the phrase "Janus Parallelism" like it's some panacea for other textual problems or it's a label of legitimacy. <!-- satisfied: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/satisfied.gif" alt="atisfied:" title="Satisfied" /><!-- satisfied: -->

Even if this choice of wording was original, this would not be a Janus Parallelism, it would be a simple doublet pun. Much more boring, I'm afraid. What I propose is even less exciting than that: Plain idiom, as the Greek text has it, verbatim, without any special pleading. It keeps Occam's Razor unbloodied. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

As for any "dissonance," I wholeheartedly invite you to logic map out what I have said and demonstrate which axioms I hold that are contradictory. I've been actively pointing out the fallacies I've been seeing in your reasoning.

In regards to your other question: it calls it Hebrew because the Hebrews used the word.

<!-- s:dontgetit: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/dontgetit.gif" alt=":dontgetit:" title="Dont Get It" /><!-- s:dontgetit: --> 100% un-evidenced assertion. The the only place anyone has used this word in this context is in the Peshitta. Not a single "Hebrew" source (linguistic or ethnographic) attests to it anywhere in the entire written record. This is categorically not a "Hebrew" word in any sense, literal, figurative, or equivocal.

So there is only one feasible conclusion: The Peshitta got this one wrong. <!-- s:| --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/neutral.gif" alt=":|" title="Neutral" /><!-- s:| -->

With regard to rabbuli, it could easily be explained as a confusion of a lamed and a nun. They can appear similar in their non-final forms. So it could be an early scribal corruption of rabbuni.

So are you asserting that there are scribal corruptions in the Peshitta? Then this corruption is legion as it's in every copy. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/sad.gif" alt="" title="Sad" /><!-- s -->

Additionally, why would any scribe choose to go with /rbwly/ ("chief shepherd") when the clarifying context was right there in the sentence ("teacher")? That would have resolved it immediately if the length of the letter's stem was unclear, even (I conjecture) if the scribe were half-asleep. The transmission of the Peshitta was not this sloppy.

As I said in my previous post: "It cannot be a matter of a Greek translator mis-reading a /l/ for a /n/, as the Peshitta -- not the Greek -- mislabels the word."

Peace,
-Steve