This note proposes a new hypothesis that ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate adequately rōzīq/g, the Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew / Aramaic, whose meaning was ‘nourishment provided by God's mercy day to day’, and not merely ‘daily [bread], needed for the day/for today’.
In this article, the author describes the nature of the 1840/1841 Turkic Karaim translation of the Bible, published at Gözleve / Jevpatorija, and especially, the translation of Nehemia, the last book in this publication. The author tries to identify the translator / copyist of Nehemia, who was working on the MS in 1672 in Mangup,having been based himself on the colophon, and surmised that the rest of the Bible translation may come from a MS copied by the same copyist. The author further speculates why the publisher of the Gözleve edition chose this particular MS. In order to define the Turkic language of the translation, the author goes in details about the earlier Jewish – both Rabbanite and Karaite – population of Çufut-Qal‘eh in the Crimea; his conclusion is that the earlier population was mostly immigrants from the North (the Duchy of Lithuania) and their language could not be originally any sort of Crimean Turkic. In the article, the author publishes and republishes different Judeo-Turkic Karaite Biblical translations and tombstone inscriptions.
A Karaite manuscript in Istanbuli Turkish written in Hebrew characters has turned up in Germany lately. This article investigates the whereabouts of the manuscript and tries to place it in its historical and linguistic context. Although the manuscript was apparently written/copied in Constantinople, the Turkic language used in it has some Crimean connections. The novelty of this discovery lies in the fact that Turkish was used by the 19th century Constantinople Karaites as a literary language.
This essay is an attempt to explore different contexts of the phrase “you are the salt of the earth” found in Matt 5:13, one of the most confusing expressions used in the whole of the New Testament. The author deals with its original meaning, exposing in the process the earliest layers of transmission of Jesus’ sayings. Versed in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus combined the meanings of MLḤ in Exod 30:35 (incense salted is potent/good/pure/holy) with that in Isa 51:6 and Jer 38:11–12 (something MLḤ might vanish away/wax old/become rotten) and put it in a new context. Jesus’ pun – loaded with multiple layers of meanings and shades of meanings – was lost in translation as simply “salt.”