The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

48 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
Hebrew Bible are another feature, albeit a limited one, of Genizah
collections. 46
Since there was so much else to include in this brief survey, items
that are either already widely familiar or are only indirectly related to
biblical studies as such have been left for last. The recovery of the
Hebrew text of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus from the Genizah is a wellrehearsed
story. The first such fragment to come to light, brought to
Cambridge from Egypt by Mrs Lewis and Mrs Gibson, was enthusiastically
identified by Schechter and acted as a catalyst for his expedition
and for other identifications elsewhere, while a whole set of
fragments, some of them from as early as the tenth century, surfaced
during Schechter's initial sorting of the material and were published
by him and Charles Taylor as a new Hebrew edition, followed by a
handsome portfolio of facsimiles two years later. 47 If that was
insufficient to prove that there had been an original Hebrew in the
second century BC, the further work of Segal and Schirmann and
Yadin's discovery at Masada of texts that tallied with the oldest
Genizah version completed the process of the book's rehabilitation to
Hebrew literature of the Second Temple period. 48 A less immediate
fame was achieved by the Zadokite Fragment or Damascus Document
46. Examples are listed in J.L. Teicher, 'Fragments of Unknown Hebrew
Incunables', JJS 1 (1948), pp. 105-11 and D. Goldstein, Hebrew Incunables in the
British Isles: A Preliminary Census (London, 1985), nos. 39 and 63 on pp. 14 and
23. It should be borne in mind that the existence of such items in the Cairo Genizah
is probably to be attributed to the arrival in North Africa and Egypt of Jews expelled
from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century.
47. A.S. Lewis, In the Shadow of Sinai: A Story of Travel and Research from
1895 to 1897 (Cambridge, 1898), pp. 168-89; Reif, 'Jenkinson and Schechter',
pp. 256, 264 and 267; S. Schechter and C. Taylor, The Wisdom of Ben
Sira.. .from Hebrew MSS in the Cairo Genizah Collection (Cambridge, 1899);
Facsimiles of the Fragments hitherto recovered of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in
Hebrew (London, 1901).
48. Sefer Ben Sira Ha-Shalem (ed. M.Z. Segal; Jerusalem, 2nd edn, 1958);
J. Schirmann, 'A New Leaf from the Hebrew "Ecclesiasticus" (Ben-Sira)', Tarbiz
27 (1958), pp. 440-43 and 'Some Additional Leaves from Ecclesiasticus in
Hebrew', Tarbiz 29 (1960), pp. 125-34; M.Z. Segal, 'Additional Leaves from
Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew', Tarbiz 29 (1960), pp. 313-23; Y. Yadin, Masada:
Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand (London, 1966), pp. 175-78; 'Two
Exciting Finds of Ben-Sira Manuscripts', Genizah Fragments 3 (April, 1982), p. 4;
and A.A. Di Leila, 'A Newly Discovered Sixth Manuscript of Ben Sira from the
Cairo Geniza', Bib 69 (1988), pp. 326-38.