Glossary

BIBL 1300: Introduction to the Bible

Dr. James R. Adair

Akkadian: East Semitic language, comprising Assyrian and Babylonian, and written in syllabic cuneiform script.
Aramaic: Northwest Semitic language, widely spoken throughout the ancient Near East and serving as the lingua franca during much of the first millennium B.C.E. Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic.
B.C.E.: Before the Common Era (equivalent to B.C.).
C.E.: Common Era (equivalent to A.D.).
Deuteronomistic History: The books Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, considered as a single editorial unit with a common perspective: prophetic, pro-monarchy, pro-Judah/anti-Israel.
DSS: Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of writings found in the Judaean desert beginning in 1947.
Etiology: A narrative that purports to give an explanation for a situation or name that exists at the time of the narrator. Example: origin of the names Esau and Jacob in Gen 25:25-26.
Exemplar: The manuscript from which another manuscript was copied. The terms refers to the manuscript that was the immediate source of the current manuscript and thus differs from the term Vorlage, which can refer to a manuscript several generations behind the manuscript in question.
Genre: A distinctive type or category of literary composition. Examples: law, history, short story, epic.
LXX: Septuagint (abbreviation from Roman numeral for seventy), the Old Greek translation of the Old Testament. Although technically the term applies only to the translation of the Pentateuch, it is widely used in a more general sense to include the Old Greek translation of other books as well.
MT: Masoretic Text, an official Jewish text of the Old Testament, in Hebrew and Aramaic, finalized in the Middle Ages.
Parousia: Greek term for the return of Christ.
Pastoral Epistles: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, so-called because large parts of the letters address pastoral concerns.
Pentateuch: The first five books of the Bible.
Peshitta: Syriac translation of the Bible.
Q: From the German Quelle, or "source," the document that many scholars believe lies behind the numerous, extensive agreements of Matthew and Luke that are not shared with Mark.
Scriptorium: A place where professional scribes copied texts. Biblical texts were often copied by monks in monasteries.
Semitic Languages: Subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic language family, historically centered in the Middle East and North Africa. Languages may be classified as East Semitic (Akkadian), South Semitic (Arabic, Ethiopic, Old South Arabic), and Northwest Semitic (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Canaanite, Moabite, Ammonite, Phoenician).
SP: Samaritan Pentateuch, the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch (Torah)
Stich: A line of poetry.
: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which tell the story of Jesus following the same general narrative sequence and with many of the same words, phrases, and even sentences.
Syriac: Language of Syria, a form of late Aramaic. The Syriac language was written in a cursive script, which was later used as the basis for writing Arabic.
Tanakh: Tanakh (from Hebrew words for Law [Torah], Prophets [Nevi'im], Writings [Kethuvim]), the Jewish Bible.
Targum: Aramaic paraphrase of a portion of the Old Testament.
Text-type: A form of the text, represented by many witnesses, that share certain common characteristics. A text-type is the largest grouping of witnesses (a smaller grouping is called a family).
Ugaritic: Ancient Semitic language (Canaanite) spoken in northern Palestine and southern Syria.
Variant: A difference of one or more letters between two copies of the same work.
Vorlage: German word meaning the text that was copied by a scribe or translated by a translator. The word literally means the text that "lies before" the reader. The term can refer to a text that lay several generations before the manuscript in question, and thus differs from exemplar, which refers to the manuscript from which another manuscript was immediately copied.
Vulgate: Latin version of the Bible, translated by Jerome in 5th century C.E.