Remarks on Samaritan Aramaic Religious Poems from Late Antiquity

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Abstract

Samaritan Aramaic literature comprises the earliest distinctly Samaritan texts and is our only source for assessing the religious ideas and practices of the Samaritans in the Byzantine period, when they formed a substantial part of the population of Palestine. A corpus of some 50 Aramaic poems is of particular importance, since it constitutes part of the Samaritan liturgy until the present day. These texts have been available in critical editions thanks to the work of Arthur Ernest Cowley and Zeev Ben-Ḥayyim, but they have not been studied much because of their difficult language. Laura Suzanne Lieber’s book provides English translations of these poems that supersede earlier renderings. This article offers an assessment of Lieber’s work as well as corrections to her translations and remarks on linguistic and other aspects of the poems.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)269-299
Number of pages31
JournalBibliotheca Orientalis
Volume80
Issue number3-4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023

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