A Specimen of Old Aramaic Verse

WHAT WAS LOST to the world when the old Aramaic literature perished, we of course cannot guess. We have not at present, and probably never shall have, any satisfactory basis for an idea of either its volume or its variety. The Elephantine papyri brought a surprise in this regard, though perhaps not to those who were familiar with the Aramaic inscriptions. In the important field of poetry, very little has thus far come to light. We know, indeed, that in the earlier Aramaic literature of the Jews it was customary to employ the standard line of three stressed syllables, as in Hebrew; the Book of Daniel furnishes sufficient illustration of this, though in only a few scattered passages. I showed, some years ago, that in the Aramaic original of the Story of the Three Guardsmen, interpolated in the Book of Ezra, and now preserved in the fragment of the old Greek translation known to us as First Esdras, the three formal discourses of the contestants at the court of Darius are composed throughout in the familiar three-beat verse.' This very interesting tale may have had a Jewish author, but it is more probably Gentile in its origin. The accentual verse is easily composed, almost too easily, in fact. Did the Aramaic-speaking Gentiles of the Persian period, or earlier, have also a syllabic meter, such as we have not found, for instance, among the Hebrews? Syllabic meter is the usual thing in the classical Syriac literature, but has not hitherto been surely recognized in the great western branch of Aramaic. I once demonstrated, in the Zeitschrift fur Assyriologie (Vol. 28, 1913, pp. 312-317) the possibility of Aramaic syllabic meter in the original form of the Lord's Prayer; showing that the Greek version given in the Third Gospel, if rendered verbally into Jewish Aramaic, can easily be made to represent strict seven-syllable verse. Several scholars, after reading the article, wrote me their approval. My own attitude toward my demonstration was, and is, one of benevolent skepticism. I was interested to show the possibility, but prefer to leave it to

Art · Hebrew · Literature · Poetry · Syllabic verse · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Philosophy

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