ichabod crane

Hello Judge! I hope you're still out there, because I have a Peshitta question for you.

In Mark 12:30, Jesus is recorded as saying "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.".

Now the interesting thing about this, of course, is the addition of "mind" to the traditional formula in Deuteronomy 6:5. There is no Hebrew word for "mind" - a Hebrew would use "heart" instead in places where we would use mind (e.g. "he thought in his heart", "he reasoned in his heart" etc). As far as I have been able to tell, there is no Aramaic word for "mind" either, at least in Aramaic before the time of Christ. They also used "heart". So I have a couple of questions for you:

(a) Wouldn't this strongly suggest that Mark was written in Greek? My speculation is that Jesus actually just said "heart, soul and strength" as in Deuteronomy, but the writer of Mark was writing for a Greek-speaking audience, and was worried that they would misunderstand if he only put "heart, soul and strength", since the word "heart" had no associations with the mind in Greek as it did in Hebrew. So he put in mind as well just to clarify what Jesus meant for his Greek-speaking readership. It seems hard to understand how Jesus could have said both "heart" and "mind" as distinct items, if there was no Aramaic word for "mind" as distinct from "heart". I'm assuming in that case that this story has some basis in history, of course. If it's got no historical basis, then the explanation would still be similar: Mark is clarifying the Deuteronomy quote for his Greek-speaking readership.

(b) However, I have checked an interlinear Peshitta on www.peshitta.org, and it does appear to my untrained eye (I don't know Aramaic or the Peshitta script) that there is a word for "mind" that is distinct from "heart". Can you help me out? Is there a different word in Syriac Aramaic for "mind"? If so, any idea when it first entered the language? And have you any better explanation than above for the addition of "mind" to the Deuteronomic formula?

Thanks Judge! You're the Peshitta man ...

judge

Hi yourself!

It could be used as an argument but I think strongly suggest may be overstating it.



If you go here you will find an Aramaic lexicon and concordance. Type the word "mind" in and you will see all the places in the Nt that an Aramaic word could be "mind".

No I do not know when these words entered the language. This link may help. When we look at all the HB quotes used by Jesus I tend to think He either paraphrased or quotes Aramaic targums we no longer have.

I think what needs to be done is a methodical examination of all the arguments for peshitta priority compared to all the arguments for greek priority.
Some one will probably do it some day.

added in edit:
p.s.here is the word from peshitta.com

ichabod crane

Thanks Judge! That's really helpful.

According to the lexicon you linked, the root of the word for mind is given as (dy, which I assume is related to the verb yada` (to know) in Hebrew (they seem to have used right-to-left character transliteration instead of reversing the order). This word is distinct according to the lexicon from the word for heart, for which the root is given as bl, which in Hebrew of course is lev.

There's only one way to take things further, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to learn Aramaic

judge

Hi Ichabod crane.

In the light of the above you may wish to consider Luqa 1:66



kai; e~qento pavnteß oiJ ajkouvsanteß ejn th'/ kardiva/ aujtw'n

('And all who heard laid it up in their heart....)

A very semitic way of writing for a greek speaker ...no?

Benni72

AFAIK at least some Greek authors (e.g. Aristotle) believed the mind to reside in the heart, so the idea is not specifically Semitic.

judge

Thanks Beni72,
Do you know of any or many instances where greek writers wrote this way?

There seem to be many in semitic writings.

2 Sam. 13:33

and 2 samuel 19:19

Are a couple of examples I think.

Benni72

You are welcome. I know of two: Aristotle's Natural History and a fable ascribed to Aesop (where a fox steals the heart of a killed deer and claims that the animal must have had none in his life since he acted foolishly). But I am by no means an expert.

ichabod crane

Yes, it sounds semitic. But we know that Luke used sources for his writing (such as Mark and Q), and presumably some of them were in Aramaic, or were translated from Aramaic, or were written in Greek by native Aramaic speakers (this is probably the case with Mark). So it is entirely possible that whatever source he used here had semitic features. Luke could not possibly have been a witness to the birth of John the Baptist, so he must have obtained this story from somewhere.

ichabod crane

Maybe so, but in Hebrew it is not just a case of the mind residing in the heart, it is more than that: there just is no word for "mind". Every time in Hebrew you would say "mind", "heart" is used instead. Similarly with early (pre-Christian era) Aramaic.

spin

What was so Semitic about it?

When Aeschylus writes in Eumenides, line 679,

"keep the oath sacred in your hearts, friends" does that sound Semitic as well?


spin