Book of Jubilees (Ethiopic)

VI

It consists of 163 leaves, with the pages divided into three columns, elegantly written by a single hand. Antoine d'Abbadie purchased it from a man of the Falasha people The Beta Israel community of Ethiopia. It appears to be no older than the current century the 19th century, relative to the 1859 publication date. It contains the Octateuch The first eight books of the Old Testament and, in the final 34 leaves, the book of Kufâlê The Book of Jubilees. However, while it offers a fairly good version of the Octateuch—one that matches the manuscript marked C in my edition of that work—the copy of Jubilees suffers from a vast number of errors and mistakes; it is hardly better than the Tübingen manuscript.

It is therefore no surprise that throughout the book of Kufâlê, a different hand has either written corrections above the lines and in the margin 1), or has used thick marks—perhaps "obelisks" original: "obelis?"—editorial marks used since antiquity to indicate suspected or corrupt text or rather charcoal "clubs" rubbed into the margin—to highlight the corrupt readings found there. Among the corrections added by this editor, some agree with the readings in the Tübingen manuscript (T), while others differ from both my primary manuscript (A) and T. Since it is not always clear whether these corrections are based on the authority of another book or simply the editor’s own guesses, I have selected whatever seemed useful and recorded them in the annotations under the symbol E original: "siglo E," meaning the siglum or abbreviation used in the critical apparatus.

Given the nature of manuscripts A and T, comparing the two inevitably resulted in a vast number of differing readings. Most of these variations admittedly concern only rules of spelling and grammar, but many also affect the meaning of the text. Far from suggesting that these manuscripts represent two different versions of the book, the variations can be explained either by the carelessness of scribes and accidental errors, or by the natural evolution of the Ge’ez The ancient Ethiopic liturgical language language across different regions and eras. Therefore, it was not my task as editor simply to transcribe one manuscript and note the variations of the other in the margin. Instead, it seemed better suited to my goal to select the superior reading from either manuscript, attempting to restore the original wording of the book as far as my limited resources allowed...

1) Furthermore, these corrections are only added consistently at the beginning of the book; they gradually become rarer and eventually cease.