A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts II (cont.)


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     According to some writers Christianity formed the
intermediary stage by which Aquila passed from 
paganism to Judaism.  This would be a very natural 
process.  But the matter, as represented by some 
Fathers of the Church, is not very flattering to 
Judaism.  Their story is somewhat as follows:  
Aquila, abiding in Jerusalem, by the order of the 
Emperor, and seeing there the disciples of the Apostles
flourishing in the faith, and doing great signs in heal-
ing and other wonders, became so deeply impressed 
therewith that he soon embraced the Christian faith.
After some time he claimed the "seal in Christ," and 
obtained it.  But he did not turn away from his former 
habit of believing, ---- to wit, in vain astronomy, of which 
he was an expert, ---- but would be casting the horo-
scope of his nativity every day, wherefore he was re-
proved and unbraided by the disciples.  However, he
would not mend, but would obstinately oppose to them 
false and incoherent arguments, such as fate and
matters therewith connected; so he was expelled 
from the Church as one unfit for salvation.  Sorely 
vexed at being dishonoured in this way, his mind was
goaded by wanton pride, and he abjured Christianity 
and Christian life, became a Jewish proselyte, and was 
circumcised.
     The best historians, however, give preference to 
the Jewish account, which tells us nothing about
Aquila's Christian days.  In this he figures as Akylas 
the proselyte, the disciple of R. Eliezer and R. Joshua.  
With the former he is said to have had a rather bad 


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encounter.  Perusing the passage in the Scripture, 
"For the Lord your God ... he does execute the 
judgment of the fatherless and the widow, and loveth 
the stranger (Ger) in giving him food and raiment" 
(Deut. 10:  17-18), Aquila exclaimed:  "So, that is all 
which God has in store for the Ger? How many 
pheasants and peacocks have I which even my slaves 
refuse to taste" (so satiated are they with delicacies)?
To be sure, modest wants and frugal habits are no 
great recommendation for a religion. At least, it can-
not under such circumstances aspire to the dignity of 
the church of a gentleman. R. Eliezer resented this 
worldliness in his pupil, and rebuked him with the 
words: "Dost thou, Ger, speak so slightingly of the 
things for which the patriarch (Jacob) prayed so 
fervently?" (Gen 33:20). This harshness of R. 
Eliezer, we are told, nearly led to a relapse of the
proselyte. He found, however, a more patient listen-
er in the meek and gentle R. Joshua, who by his 
sympathetic answer reconciled him to his new faith.  
     The work which brought Aquila's name to pos-
terity is in his Greek version of the Old Testament, 
which he undertook because he found the text of the 
Septuagint greatly disfigured, both by wilful inter-
polations and by blundering ignorance. It was pre-
pared under the direction of the two Rabbis just men-
tioned (R. Eliezer and R. Joshua) and their fellow-
disciple R. Akiba. The main feature of Aquila's ver-
sion is an exaggerated literalism, which, as one may 
imagine, often does violence to the Greek. It is 


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such awkward Greek that, as somebody has said, it 
is almost good Hebrew. The alternative which lay 
before Aquila was, as it seems, between awkward
Greek and bad and false renderings, and he decided 
for the former.  One of the Church Fathers, when 
alluding to this version, says: "Thereupon (after his 
conversion to Judaism) he devoted himself most 
assiduously to the study of the Hebrew tongue and 
the elements thereof, and when he had completely 
mastered the same, he set to interpreting (the Scrip-
tures), not of honest purpose, but in order to pervert 
certain sayings of Scriptures, hurling his attacks against 
the version of the seventy-two interpreters, whith a 
view to giving a different rendering to those things 
which are testified of Christ in the Scriptures." 
     Now, so far as one can judge from the little 
retained to us his version, Aquila's perverting 
activity did not go much farther than that which 
engaged the Revision Committee for many years, who
also gave different renderings, at least in the margin, 
to the so-called Christological passages.  It is true 
that Jews prefered his version to the Septuagint, 
which at that time became the playground of theolo-
gians, who deduced from it all sorts of possible and 
impossible doctrines, not only by means of interpreta-
tion, but also by actual meddling with the text.  One 
has only to read with some attention the Pauline
Epistles to see with what excessive freedom Scriptural 
texts were handled when the severest rules exegesis 
were abandoned.  Some modern divenes even exalt


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these misquotations and wrong translations as the
highest goal of Christian liberty, which is above such 
paltry, slavish considerations as exactness and accu-
racy.  Aquila's version may thus have interfered with 
theological liberty.  But there is no real evidence that 
he entered upon his work in a controversial spirit.
His undertaking was probably actuated by purely 
scholarly motives.  As a fact, the most learned of the 
Church Fathers (e. g. St. Jerome) praise it often as a 
thorough and exact piece of work.  As the Rabbis, 
tradition records, that when Aquila put his version 
before his Jewish masters, they were so delighted with 
it that they applied to it the verse in Psalms:  "Thou
art fairer than the children of men, grace is poured in 
thy lips (45: 3)."  The Rabbis were, indeed, not 
entirely insensible to the grace of the Greek language, 
and they interpreted the verse in Genesis 9: 27, to 
mean that the beauty of Japeth (the type of Greece),
which is so much displayed in his language, shall by
the fact that the Torah will be rendered into the Greek
tongue, find access to the tents (or synagogues) of
Shem (represented by Israel.)  In the case of Aquila,
however, the grace admired in his version was, one 
must assume, the grace of truth.  To the grace of an 
elegant style and fluent diction, as we have seen, it 
can lay no claim.
     For most of our knowledge of Aquila we are 
indebted to Origen.  We know his amiable weakness 
for universal salvation.  He thought not even the 
devil beyond the possibility of repentance.  Accord-


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ingly, he saved the "Jewish proselyte" from oblivion 
by inserting several of his renderings in his famous 
Hexapla, which, however, has come down to us in a 
wrecked and fragmentary state.  The Aquila frag-
ments discovered in the Genizah represent, in some
cases, Piyutim, in others, the Talmud of Jerusalem, 
and the Greek under them is written in unicals, stated 
by specialists to date from the beginning of the sixth 
century.  They are the first continuous pieces coming, 
not through the medium of quotations, but directly 
from Aquila's work, and must once have formed a 
portion of a Bible used in some Hellenistic Jewish
synagogue for the purpose of public reading.  The 
Tetragrammation is neither translated nor transcribed, 
but written in the archaic Hebrew characters found in the
Siloam inscription.  Considering that Aquila's 
version is so literal that the original is always trans-
parently visible through it, these fragments will prove 
an important contribution to our knowledge of the 
state of the Hebrew text during the first centuries of 
our era, and of the mode of its interpretation.  A part 
of these fragments have been already edited in various 
publications, by Dr C. Taylor, the Master of St. 
John's College, and Mr. Burkitt, the fortunate dis-
coverer of the first Aquila leaf.  But more leaves 
have since come to light, which will be edited in course 
of time.
     To return to the liturgical fragments found in the 
Genizah.  Under this head may be included the di-
dactic poetry of the synagogue.  It is a peculiar mix-


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ture of devotional passages and short epigrammatic 
sentences, representing, to a certain extent, the Wis-
dom literature of the Synagogue in the Middle Ages.  
Sometimes they are written, not unlike the Book of 
Proverbs in the old Bible manuscripts, in two cloumns, 
each column giving a hemistich.  The examination of 
this class of fragments requires great caution and close 
attention, not so much on account of their own merits
as because of their strong resemblance to Ecclesias-
ticus both in form and in matter.  You dare not neg-
lect the former lest some piece of the latter escape
you.  The identification of the Ecclesiasticus frag-
ments is, indeed, a very arduous task, since our knowl-
edge of this apocryphon has been till now attainable 
only through its Greek or Syriac disguise, which 
amounts sometimes to a mere defaced caricature of 
the real work of Sirach.  But I hardly need to point 
out that the recovery of even the smallest scrap of 
the original Hebrew compensates richly for all the 
labor spent on it.  Apart from its semi-sacred char-
acter, these Sirach discoveries restore to us the only 
genuine document dating from the Persian-Greek 
period (from about 450 till about 160 B.C.E.), the 
most obscure in the whole of Jewish history.  And I 
am strongly convinced that with all his "Jewish
prejudices" he will prove a safer guide in this laby-
rinth of guesses and counter-guesses than liberal-
minded "backward prophet" of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, whose source of inspiration is not always above 
doubt.3  I am happy to state that my labours in this 


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department were rewarded with several discoveries of
fragments from Sirach's "Wisdom Book."  They will
soon be submitted to the necessary study preceding 
their preparation for the press, when they will appear 
in a separate volume.
     The Rabbinic productions of the earlier sages, 
teachers, and interpreters, as they are embodied in the 
Mishnah, the Additions, and the Talmud of Jerusalem 
and the Talmud of Babylon, formed the main subjects 
of study in the mediæval schools of the Jews.  it is 
thus only natural that the Genizah should yield a 
large number of fragments of the works mentioned, 
and they do, indeed, amount to many hundreds.  
Some of these are provided with vowel-points, and 
occasionally also with accents, and thus represent a 
family of manuscripts hitherto known only through 
the evidence of certain authorities testifying to the fact 
that there existed copies of early Rabbinic works 
prepared in the way indicated.  But what the student 
is especially looking out for is for remainders of the 
Talmud of Jerusalem, which, though in some respects 
more important for the knowledge of Jewish history 
and the intelligent conception of the minds of 
the Rabbis than the "twin-Talmud of the East,"
has been, by certain untoward circumstances, badly 
neglected in the schools, and thus very little copied 
by the scribes.  Its real importance and superi-
ority above similar contemporary productions was 
only recognized in the comparatively modern centu-
ries, when the manuscripts, as just indicated never 


- 28 -


very ample, had long disappeared.  The Genizah opens 
a new mine in this direction, too, and the number of 
fragments of the Jerusalem Talmud increasing daily,
also amounting to a goodly volume, will doubtless 
be published by some student in due time.
     Where the Genizah promises the largest output is 
in the department of history, especially the period
intervening between the birth of Saadya (892) and 
the death of Maimonides (1205).  This period, which 
gave birth to the greatest of the Eminences (Gaonim), 
Rabbi Saadya, Rabbi Sherira, and Rabbi Hai, which
witnessed the hottest controversies beteen the Rab-
binites and the Karaites and other schismatics, and 
which saw the disintegration of the great old schools 
in Babylon, and the creation of new centres for the 
study of the Torah in Europe and in North Africa, 
forms, as is well known, one of the most important 
chapters in Jewish history.  But this chapter will now 
have to be re-written; any number of conveyances, 
leases, bills, and private letters are constantly turning 
up, thus affording us a better insight into the social 
life of the Jews during those remote centuries.  New 
letters from the Eminences addressed to their contem-
poraries, scattered over various countries, are daily 
coming to light, and will form an important addition 
to the Responsa literature of the Gaonim.  Even entire 
new books or fragments of such, composed by the 
Gaonim, and only known by refrences have been 
discovered.  Of more significance are such documents


- 29 -


as those bearing the controversy between Rabbi 
Saadya and his contemporary Ben Meïr, the head of 
the Jews in palestine, which prove that even at 
that time the question of authority over the whole of 
Jewry, and of the prerogative of fixing the calendar,
was still a contested point between the Jews of Pales-
tine and their brethren in the dispersion.  The con-
troversy was a bitter one and of long duration, as 
may be seen from another document dating from the 
Eleventh Century, the Scroll of Abiathar, which, at
the same time reveals the significant fact that the 
antagonism between the Priestly and Kingly, or 
the Aaronide and Davidic families, had not quite died 
down even at this late period.  Some of the docu-
ments are autograph.  It is enough to mention here 
the letter of Chushiel ben Elhanan (or Hananel) 
of Kairowan, addressed to Shemariah ben Elhanan 
of Egypt, written about the year 1000.  To these two 
Rabbis, legend attributes a large share in the trans-
planting of the Torah in North Africa, so that our 
document will prove an important contribution to 
the history of the rise of the Yeshiboth outside of 
Babylon.
     Looking over this enormous mass of fragments 
about me, in the shifting and examination of which I 
am now occupied, I cannot overcome a sad feeling steal-
ing over me, that I shall hardly be worthy to see all the
results which the genizah will add to our knowledge 
of Jews and Judaism.  The work is not for one man 


- 30 -


and not for one generation.  It will occupy many a 
specialist, and much longer than a lifetime.  How-
ever, to use an old adage, "It is not thy duty to com-
plete the work, but neither art thou free to desist 
from it."