Sigrid Peterson

petersig@ccat.sas.upenn.edu

The Syriac Books of Women

Preliminary Notes

I have based much of this paper is based on perusal of manuscript catalogs. The master collection of manuscripts, because of the breadth of material represented, is that of the British Museum, now housed in the British Library. This master collection, much of it from the Nitrian desert in Egypt, deserved a master cataloger, and found him in William Wright. Wright’s catalog described each manuscript, and detailed each element of appearance and contents. In contrast, a more recent catalog, of Syriac mss mostly found in the Harvard Libraries, described Syr 59 by naming a couple of items, and then generalizing the rest as “other pseudepigrapha,” without further helpful characterization.

Wright methodically sorted his notes on his manuscripts. Thus he proceeded from full codices of Syriac material “according to the Peshitta version” to partial codices, with sub-collection s such as the Pentateuch or prophets, to single books. He then began again with a similarly sorted group of material “according to the Septuagint translation (OG).” There is far less material in this classification, and it includes the subclass of Syrohexaplar mss.

Wright’s orderly classification, taken together with the recent sea-change in Peshitta scholarship that recognized the dependence of the Syriac Old Testament on the Hebrew-Aramaic Jewish scriptures (HB/OT), supports the Jewish basis of Peshitta texts. The unanswered, uninvestigated question concerns the religious background of the Syriac translations of the Apocryphal (Deutero-canonical) books, (now) known from Greek, except for Ben Sira. Other Apocryphal books seem to have semitic language Vorlagen — for example, 1 Macc.

There are two roots to this study. First, when doing a further manuscript search for mss of 6 Macc, I came across two nineteenth-century Bodleian mss that referred to a “Book of illustrious Women,” which encompassed Ruth and Susanna. Further on in HB/OT collection of which it was a part, another “Book of Illustrious Women, comprising Judith and Esther” showed up. Searching more of the nineteenth-century catalogs of manuscript collections revealed that these books of women were indeed unusual. Often an HB/OT manuscript, although appearing complete with all books, would omit Ruth and Esther. Judith and Susanna would be omitted from collections of apocryphal books. So it is not simply the “titled” appearance of these four named women, who figure in the biblical books named after them, that is intriguing; it is also their absence from some manuscripts which include the rest of the canonical or apocryphal books!

The second of the roots to this study is the work by Catherine Burris and Lucas Van Rompay [see links below], who isolated and described a very particular “Book of Women,” one which contains the New Testament (NT) Apocryphal story known as “The Acts of (Paul) and Thecla” (Thecla). Thecla appeared in addition to the four women — Ruth, Susanna, Judith, and Esther — already named; her addition rounds out the group of five books that comprise a single anthology, a Book of Women.

Prior scholarship also includes an interpretive study by André Lacocque that termed the group of four women “subversive.” Similarly theoretical is the second half of Burris’s study, which applies Wolfgang Iser’s theoretical portrayal of the reader’s experience of the text to an examination of the way in which Ruth, Susanna, Judith, and Esther foreshadow and emphasize or diminish aspects of Thecla’s story. To be valid, however, this examination would need to provide detail of the book itself, and the setting in which its (feminine?) readers approached the text(s). Were the texts read aloud? Were they read in one sitting? Was there a cult of Thecla with cultic observances that included reading all of these books? Answers to these questions would connect the discourse on Iser with ways in which women would read The Book of Women. Since I doubt that we have such information, I doubt the value of Burris’s analysis using Iser’s theory.

In the paper that follows I will discuss the heterodox ways in which books of women appear (and sometimes disappear) from biblical-apocryphal Syriac manuscripts. This study will include Burris’s singular Book of Women as one example, not as an exemplar.

Classes of Books

To begin with, according to the nineteenth-century manuscript catalogs there appear to be four classes of books of named women.

• First, there is the isolated appearance in a manuscript of a single book of one named woman; most often Ruth, as indubitably biblical in the HB/OT canonical sense. Next most often, so far, is the appearance of Susanna, who is definitely not in the HB/OT canon. I have not seen Judith or Esther in single appearances yet, in my examination of manuscript catalogs, though they may be there.
  
• Second, there is the appearance of one pair of women. This may be in a “Book of Illustrious Women” or some other defined section, or it may not. The more frequently occurring pair is Ruth-Susanna.
• Third, there is a fuller collection of women in singular configurations: such as Ruth, Susanna, and Esther. The Van Rompay-Burris Book of Women is such a singular configuration.
• Fourth, there is the isolation and inclusion of the four books of named women in full-scale biblical manuscripts. Generally these include some of the Apocrypha as well as HB/OT canonical books.
• Fifth, there are the commentaries, with their own peculiarities of order and inclusion v. exclusion. For example, the J-F catalog of the British Museum collection to 1838 lists Susanna alone — in a commentary by Jacob of Edessa — then three books intervene, then the three books of Ruth, Judith, and Esther follow.

Susanna , alone and together with other books, occurs more often than the preserved books of Thecla, alone and together with other books, and more often than the biblical Ruth. So the first question of the evening is a speculative one. What do we make of this? Is it slightly meaningful, or of great import?

I suggest that we compare this finding to the emphasis that Burris and Van Rompay place on the sheer number of Thecla texts they have found. To that end, for the first part of tonight’s inquiry, let’s look at the short article in which Burris and Van Rompay discuss their search for Thecla texts.

Catherine Burris and Lucas Van Rompay described a singular Syriac ms of a “Book of Women,” dating from the fifth or sixth c. CE. The sole contents of the manuscript are the biblical book of Ruth, as well as the sisterly travellers Esther, Susanna, and Judith - not necessarily canonical at the time someone created this anthology.

Consider, as you read these articles, how it would affect their arguments if we were to find that there exist at least twice as many mss of Susanna, a non-canonical, pre-Christian, text — in Syriac — as they have found for Thecla. And so far, surveying about half as many ms catalogs, I have found twice the number of texts of Susanna as of Thecla. Now Susanna is often paired with Daniel, as well as existing in the company of other Books of Women — Ruth, Esther, and Judith. That increases her frequency over that of Ruth, but shouldn’t, should it?

The first article by Burris and Van Rompay is at the following URI:

http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol5No2/HV5N2BurrisVanRompay.html

Read their paragraph [2] & [11] & [15] & [23] with a critical eye. Also note the information about the four “pre-NT” books Ruth, Susanna, Esther, and Judith - The “Books of Women” in the title of my paper — in [12]

You will find their further article on Thecla at this URI — although it doesn’t add anything to the question I posed at the beginning:

http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No2/HV6N2BurrisVanRompay.html

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I am, right now, intrigued by two or three further questions. I would like, therefore, to shift to consider these questions, ones more directly concerned with text criticism. The general realm of the question is whether the four books, sometimes anthologized as “Book of Illustrious Women” or “Book of Notable Women,” tell us about their roots. That is, can we look beyond the Peshitta text, the primary source for each, to origins in a known version of the Greek text, or in resemblance of some sort to the Hebrew text that underlies the Peshitta OT text.

Recall that we do (now) know that a few Syriac mss of books of the canon of the HB/OT were translated / produced from the Greek, sometimes from  a Greek version with Hexaplaric signs, hence the so-called SyroHexapla. But unless further evidence shows otherwise — which it might — we will start working from the viewpoint that even the Ayriac apocryphal books have Jewish — Theodotion, Hebrew, pre-Christian something or other — roots.

In the case of Esther, I have the materials at hand to examine this and establish the Jewish roots of the Peshitta text fairly quickly — and will post them elsewhere on the web and link to them here.

I am most curious about Susanna, though, since she occurs most often in catalogs of Syriac mss of the 19th c. So we will look quickly at the NETS translation information about Susanna, and ask what further information we need — or is there enough?