Description
These volumes make available a diplomatic text and an English translation, the first ever modern translation, of the Commentary on Genesis preserved in Armenian and attributed to the fourth century poet, Ephrem the Syrian. Heretofore this text was known only from a single Venice manuscript, V873, printed by the Mekhitarist Fathers in 1836. This diplomatic edition utilizes the two other known manuscripts: another from the Venice Mekhitarist library, V352; and one from the library at Bzommar, Bza437. A lengthy introduction, the first real study of this text, demonstrates that while this Commentary is clearly based on a Syriac original, it represents a text that cannot have been written by the fourth-century Ephrem, but rather one that stems from a Syrian-Armenian milieu of around the tenth or eleventh centuries. This Commentary displays no correspondence with the surviving genuine Syriac Commentary on Genesis by Ephrem the Syrian, and makes manifest use of the work of Severus of Edessa (d. 861). This Commentary also shows marked characteristics of the translation technique well-known to have been supplied by the Armenians of the tenth to twelfth centuries.
