The Antiochian Arabic Versions of the Liturgical Psalter of the 17th–18th Centuries
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Abstract
The paper examines the history of editing the Arabic liturgical Psalter in the Church of Antioch after the introduction of Arabic printing in the Ottoman Empire. The study is based on a collation of the manuscripts and printed versions of the Arabic Psalter. The first important step towards the standardization of the Arabic Psalter was the 1706 Aleppo edition of the Metropolitan Athanasios Dabbās. It was based on a 17th-century handwritten text derived from the version of the well-known Bible translator ‘Abdallāh ibn al-Faḍl of Antioch (11th cent.). The 1747 Psalter, printed in Bucharest, was based entirely on the Aleppo edition, except for minor grammatical changes. In 1735, an improved version, based on the Aleppo edition, was printed at the Shuwayr monastery in Lebanon. The Shuwayr edition demonstrates a much higher quality in terms of spelling, grammatical norms of Classical Arabic, and conformity to the Septuagint, the Vorlage of the Arabic Bible of the Church of Antioch. This version underwent many reprints and became the second important stage in the editing of the printed Arabic Psalter. The third 18th-century version of the Psalter, with independent corrections in the biblical texts and with the kathismata prayers borrowed from the Shuwayr version, was the Beirut edition of 1752.
The editors of the Psalter employed a consistent approach: biblical texts (psalms and Odes of the prophets) underwent minimal intervention, since their long-established version, edited by ‘Abdallāh ibn al-Faḍl, had already been tested over centuries and enjoyed authority. At the same time, the editors allowed themselves more freedom with the kathismata prayers: the latter underwent many lexical changes and sentence restructuring, as they were not biblical texts and were influenced by many colloquialisms and features of Christian Middle Arabic.
The publication offers a Ukrainian translation of the second preface to the Aleppo Psalter (1706) and the preface and afterword to the Beirut Psalter (1752), which contain important references to the editorial work on the Arabic text.
How to Cite
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Psalter; Arab Christians; the Church of Antioch; ‘Abdallāh ibn al-Faḍl of Antioch; Athanasios III Dabbās; printing; editing; psalms; Christian Middle Arabic
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