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Catherine Burris The Syriac Book of Women Text and Metatext A sixth-century Syriac manuscript currently in the British Library preserves a collection of texts that includes the stories of four notable women of Jewish scripture—Ruth, Esther, Susanna, and Judith—and the story of Thecla , a disciple of Paul and almost a martyr.1 Its title is Ktâbâ d-neššê, the Book of Women, and while various scholars have discussed the individual texts within this collection, no one has discussed the collection as a whole.2 86 I am grateful to the participants in the Early Christian Book Conference for their assorted questions , comments, and suggestions on this paper. I am also grateful to Lucas Van Rompay for first bringing the sixth-century manuscript to my attention, and for later helping me turn the paper into my current book-length project. 1. Add. 14,652. See W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, Acquired since the Year 1838, 3 vols. (London, 1870–72), 2:651–2 (no. 731). The British Museum manuscripts are now in the collection of the British Library. The Peshitta Institute has accepted Wright’s paleographic dating of the manuscript, assigning it the siglum 6f1. The left number of the siglum indicates the century , the letter the category of manuscript, and the right number differentiates manuscripts within the category . The manuscript is a unified document, written in a single sixth-century hand from beginning to end and titled in the same hand. The folios are numbered in Coptic, and the surviving quires are marked with letters, numbers, and Arabic words. The manuscript has suffered considerable damage; it is stained and torn, and several leaves are missing. As a result, there are gaps in four of the five texts included. The first text, Ktâbâ da-Rc ut (the Book of Ruth), lacks verses 4.2b to the end. The second text, Ktâbâ d-(‘)Est êr (the Book of Esther), is missing until the middle of 1:12. Ktâbâ d-Šušan (the Book of Susanna) appears next; it is complete. Ktâbâ d-Ihudit (the Book of Judith) currently lacks 15:8 to 16:2. Tašc itâ d-Taqlâ talmidtâh d-Pawlos (the History of Thecla, disciple of Paul) ends the collection; much of the latter portion of the story is lost with several missing leaves, as is any original colophon that might have appeared at the end of the Book of Women. 2. This is an important manuscript in the study of Syriac literature, providing the earliest surviving I suggest that the Book of Women is more than the sum of its parts, that it does considerably more than preserve early instances of certain texts. As a deliberately created, titled collection, it is an attempt to guide reading, driven by some of the same anxieties that prompted the sort of textual emendation discussed by Kim Haines-Eitzen in Chapter 9 of this volume, but accomplished by textual activity that has more in common with that outlined by Caroline Humfress in relation to Justinian’s Digest of Roman law. If “the Christian authority of the Digest was not achieved by a Christianization of the substantive principles of classical Roman jurisprudence . . . [but] rather created by enveloping the hallowed classical books of the Roman jurists within a new order of texts,”3 the Book of Women achieves coherence not by reconciling the disparities between the texts but by enveloping existing texts within a new context. The texts acquire new meanings in their new context, altered as the contents of the Digest were altered “by their copying, restructuring, and complex shuffling together.”4 The Book of Women reveals a strategy of reading, constructing a metatextual narrative that seeks to dictate the ways in which the component texts are understood. This collection is a construction, not merely the appropriation of or assent to an existing collection of texts for a new use. The surviving Book of Women T h e S y r i a c B o o k o f W o m e n 87 texts of Ruth, Esther, and Judith, and one of the earliest texts of Susanna. See the Peshitta Institute’s List of Old Testament Peshitta Manuscripts (Preliminary Issue) (Leiden, 1961), index 2, under each book, and the institute’s seven updates to the list, published in Vetus Testamentum. Susanna also occurs in one other sixth-century manuscript, BL Add. 14,445. It is dated 532...

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