Where the Scriptures Come From

The concentration of scripture in this branch has no parallel. Biblical Hebrew carries the Tanakh and, through it, the Christian Old Testament. Aramaic carries parts of Daniel and Ezra, the Targums, most of the Talmud, and, in its Syriac form, a large Christian literature including the Peshitta. Classical Arabic carries the Qur'an. Ge'ez carries the Ethiopian canon, including Enoch and Jubilees in complete form where other traditions have only fragments. Classical Mandaic carries the Ginza Rabba and the scriptures of the Mandaeans, the last surviving Gnostic community.

Samaritan Hebrew carries the Samaritan Pentateuch, which differs from the Masoretic text in thousands of places. Ugaritic and the other Canaanite languages carry the mythological texts that supply the closest available context for early Israelite religion. This is one branch of one branch of one family. The proximity matters practically: a term in one of these scriptures often has a recognisable cognate in another, sometimes with the same sense and sometimes with a sharply different one, and the study of any of them is improved by knowing the others. It also means that translations between them are unusually transparent, and that arguments about what a word means in one tradition frequently turn on how a neighbour used it.