[work in progress]
Sources
Asselin de Cherville (according to William Jowett, 1822)
Abba Abraham translated the full Bible into Amharic from ca. 1807 to 1817. According to William Jowett, Asselin de Cherville reported:
“I read with my Abyssinian, slowly, and with the utmost attention, every verse of the Sacred Volume, in the Arabic Version which we were about to translate. All those words which were either abstruse, difficult, or foreign to the Arabic, I explained to him, by the help of the Hebrew Original, the Syriac Version, or the Septuagint [i.e. the Greek Old Testament]; as well as a few Glossaries and Commentaries, which I had gathered about me: but he also often found the key to them in the Ethiopic, or Gheez.” (Jowett, Researches, p. 200).
Questions and Conjectures
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Which was the Arabic source used by Abba Abraham and Asselin de Cherville?
Among Central European scholars and Catholics, the most respected Arabic Bible translation in the early 19th century was the Catholic Bible published in Rome in 1671 (under the direction of Sergius Risi and Vincenzo Candido). Since Asselin the Cherville wanted to become a Catholic clergyman in his youth and had an academic/ linguistic interests in commissioning a Bible translation into Amharic, the primary source used by Abraham and Asselin was most likely the Arabic Bible mentioned above.
- Which was the Bible the Arabic speeking Greek Orthodox Church in Cairo preferred at that time?
What was the role of the London Polyglot Bible?
The London Polyglot Bible (published under the direction of Brian Walton in the 1650s) doesn’t include the Deuterocanonical OT writings. Therefore, its Arabic text was not the primary source.
However, it might have been used to look up the Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Ge’ez translations of difficult Arabic words versions (see Asselin de Cherville comments on the translation process above).
Cross-references
» Main Sources on Abraham’s Life
» Manuscripts related to Abba Abraham
» Bibliography with links