1.02 Maija Priess

Towards Critical Editions of Biblical books

“The editing of Geez biblical texts was one of the starting points of Ethiopian studies and accompanied its whole history”, says Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (see Volume 1, 569ff). The first such publication in the West was Potken’s edition of the Ethiopic Psalter in Rome in 1513. But though five centuries have elapsed, the need for good editions of Ethiopic texts is still acute. In the first place, not even all the books of the Ethiopic Bible have received full attention —especially for the Old Testament. Second, many of those editions are based on insufficient manuscript evidence, such that it is impossible to know where the text being offered stands within the textual history. And finally, most of those who produced editions of the Ethiopic Old Testament were interested in the Gə’əz text only for what could tell about the textual history of the Greek Tradition, its Vorlage.  This led scholars to seek only the Old Ethiopic (Axumite) form of the text and systematically to ignore the textual history of Ethiopia’s biblical traditions beyond the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, which is to say, most of the extant manuscript tradition. The situation is somewhat better with regard to the books of Ethiopic New Testament. In recent years many so far unknown Biblical manuscripts have been collected, catalogued and digitized by Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project (EMIP), by Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT), and by the Project of Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia. Salvation, Preservation, Research (Ethio-SPaRe), among others.

This panel will explore ongoing research related to textual histories and editions of the books of the Gə’əz Bible, especially the Old Testament (including those dubbed Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical outside Ethiopia). This could also include studies focused on the andəmta commentary tradition.

ACCEPTED PAPERS
Dr. CHRISTIE-MILLER Ian Ge'ez Goes Global 
Dr. HACOHEN Ran The Ethiopic Bible Goes Digital 
Prof. KNIBB Michael Issues in the Preparation of Critical Editions of Biblical Books 
Dr. LEE Ralph Stories in the Textual History of Ethiopic Deuteronomy 
Prof. & Dr. DELAMARTER Steve & PRIESS Maija Textual History of Ethiopic Amos 
Prof. & Mr STUCKENBRUCK Loren & Ted ERHO The Project for a New Edition of Ethiopic Enoch