Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Revue des Etudes Juives
Angaben zur Quelle:
179, 3-4 (2020) 399-416
Keywords:
Bible. Versions
;
Saʻadia ben Joseph
;
Bible. Manuscripts
;
Bible Geography
Abstract:
In an unpublished lecture at Harvard, Bernard Septimus showed that there were traces of Saadia’s Tafsīr – his repercussive translation of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic – in the Old Spanish Bibles of the 14th and 15th centuries. Our study enlarges Septimus’s repertoire with two new examples drawn from the Old Spanish renderings of biblical toponyms. The identification of the city-name On as Alexandria in an Old Spanish translation of Gen 41:45 seems to reflect the rendering of the Hebrew kohen on as imāmi al-iskandariyya in some manuscripts of the Tafsīr. A more striking example is the unusual Old Spanish rendering of hare araraṭ ('the mountains of Ararat') as montes de los bugíos ('the mountains of monkeys') in Gen 8:4 (bugíos is a rare and archaic Ibero-Romance Arabism). The Old Spanish montes de los bugíos reflects an etymological mistranslation of the Arabic 'alā jibāli qardā ('on the mountains of Corduene') based on qardā’s shared root with a plural form of the most common Arabic word for monkey (qird).
DOI:
10.2143/REJ.179.3.3288804
URL:
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