Garegin Hambardzumyan - The Book of Sirach in the Armenian Biblical Tradition: Yakob Nalean and His Commentary on Sirach

Garegin Hambardzumyan

The Book of Sirach in the Armenian Biblical Tradition

Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies

Edited by
Friedrich V. Reiterer, Beate Ego and Tobias Nicklas

Volume 33

ISBN 978-3-11-043163-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-042896-4
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-042905-3
ISSN 1865-1666

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de .

2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

Learning that a renowned publishing house such as Walter de Gruyter is willing to publish my PhD dissertation within Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Series was a great delight not only for me but also for my three-years-shut-downless laptop which eternally fell asleep after giving up to contain the amount of material that it had to, while I was doing my research. I would like to exprees my deep gratitude to de Gruyter and to Prof. Friedrich Reiterer personally, for their kind consideration to include the current work into the DCLS.

As Ben Sira himself would have put it, Let us now sing the praises of famous men. These are those people to whom I offer my appreciation and respect for all the support shown to me in the past three years of my studies as a doctoral student.

My first words of gratitude go to my two supervisors: Dr. Mark Finney and Rt. Rev. Dr. Vahan Hovhanessian for their continued support throughout my research. It has been an honour to work with Dr. Finney whose constant encouragement and wise guidance made the entire process of my research a great experience of exploration of new horizons in the field of biblical studies. Bp. Vahan Hovhanessian, my second supervisor, has been a tremendous mentor for me throughout the past three years. He opened up to me an entire spectrum of opportunities which will help me to be actively involved in academia for the visible future of my life.

I also thank Robert Thomson, Alison Salvesen and John Barton at the University of Oxford as well as Allan Lowe (Leeds), Claude Cox (Canada), Michael Stone (Jerusalem) and Alexander Di Lella (USA) for their wise advice and helpful comments on various parts and aspects of my thesis.

My sincere thanks to the members of the College of the Resurrection in Mirfield and St. Stephens House in Oxford for their warm hospitality and care

shown to me while writing my dissertation. Especially, I am indebted to Fr. Peter Allan, the Principal of CoR, and Canon Robin Ward, the Principal of SSH, for their personal kindness and help. I am also extremely grateful to Fr. Nicolas Stebbing CR for a much helpful course of Greek which I eventually did for credit at the University of Sheffield and to Deborah Rooke for a year-long course of Hebrew at Oxford. I thank Theo van Lint, Chair of Armenian Studies at Oxford, Dr. Christine Gore, Principal of the Yorkshire Ministry Course, and many others for the opportunities given to me to lecture on the subjects of my interest. In addition,I thank Revd Katherine Price for her continuous support and Mrs. Alison

Bygrave in the Department office for her help and advice as well as the librarians at Oxford Bodleian libraries and Sheffield Western Bank library.

I would also like to express my gratitude for their love and support, to the members of both the parishes of Holy Trinity, Manchester and St. Yeghiche, London, where I have been serving as a visiting pastor all this time.

Finally, my wholehearted thanks to my family and the Brotherhood of Holy Etchmiadzin to which I belong, for their prayers and love.

There has been growing interest in the Book of the Wisdom of Sirach over recent decades. Scholars have been particularly attracted to this book because of its almost encyclopedic coverage of a wide variety of topics, moral, theological and historical. Since the famous discovery of the Geniza MSS at the Qaraite Synagogue in Cairo, as well as the subsequent discoveries at Qumran and Masada, the book of Sirach has received significantly increased scholarly attention. Before these findings, the Hebrew text of Sirach had been considered extinct and only a few verses from the entire book were preserved in Hebrew Rabbinic literature. No serious textual analysis had been produced on any of the translations of Sirach prior to these new discoveries.

Straight after the new MSS were excavated, they were identified as copies of the original Hebrew text, that is, they were free from any direct dependence on Syriac or Greek texts.

The role of Sirach as a part of the Writings (ktvm) of the OT has been a matter of dispute throughout the centuries and its use both in Rabbinic literature and in the Christian patristic tradition has given rise to a whole spectrum of arguments from later scholars. A fair proportion of these disputes have been with respect to the place of Sirach in the OT.