HistoricalChristian.Faith

Bar Hebraeus on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 1286 (the Chronography / Maktbānūt Zabnē worked on from c. 1275 to his death, 30 July 1286) · Wikipedia
Summary: The great Syriac Orthodox polymath — maphrian of the East, physician, philosopher, and historian (Gregory Abū al-Faraj, "Bar Hebraeus," son of the Hebrew) — is the late-medieval terminus of the chronology strand, but a negative witness, and his page is here to set the record straight. His great Chronography follows the Septuagint's longer reckoning of Genesis 5–11 and flatly tabulates the divergent "Syrian and Hebrew" totals beside it — yet it levels no charge of deliberate Jewish tampering. The modern deflation camp (Henry B. Smith Jr.) repeatedly lists Bar Hebraeus among the chronographers who held the rabbis "deliberately deflated" the chronology, but the listing does not survive inspection: Smith quotes no words of Bar Hebraeus, the explanatory note in the Chronography that accounts for the divergences is the modern editor Bedjan's (and ascribes them to which version the author followed, not to corruption), and even the one Bar Hebraeus sentence later produced is a bare statement of the numeric difference. He held every material of the charge and drew none of it — the measure, at the strand's far end, of how thin its textual base is.

Claims & evidence

He follows the Septuagint chronology and tabulates the shorter Hebrew/Syriac total — without accusation

"And from ADAM to the death of MOSES is three thousand eight hundred (or, four hundred) and fifty years, according to ANIANUS the monk, and this computation agreeth with his. According to the Septuagint, however, it is three thousand eight hundred (or, four hundred) and eighty-two years, and according the Syrian and Hebrew [Books] it is two thousand four hundred and twenty [years]."

— Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), "The Patriarchs. From Adam to Moses," source.¹ A neutral three-way tabulation — Anianus, Septuagint, "Syrian and Hebrew" — with no word of malice attached to the shorter figure. Through the patriarchal section Bar Hebraeus gives the antediluvian begetting-ages in their longer, Septuagint form (Adam begets Seth "when he was two hundred and thirty years old"; Seth at 205; Enosh at 190; and so on), and reckons "the years from ADAM to the FLOOD… two thousand, and two hundred, and forty and two" after Josephus — i.e. he simply uses the Greek chronology the Fathers preferred, and records the divergent Hebrew/Syriac totals "in historical fashion" as alternative reckonings.

The divergences are a matter of which version he followed — the explaining note is his editor's, not a charge

"A GENERAL WARNING by BEDJAN. Various statements will be found in this HISTORY which do not agree with the Book of the Law of the Syrians which is called 'peshitta'… It is not seemly for us to stumble over these because our author made use of the Book of the Law according to the Seventy (i.e. the Septuagint), and the Book of the Law according to the SAMARITANS, and other ancient [versions of the] Scriptures, and he wrote down in historical fashion the opinion of each one of them even as he found it."

— note by the editor Paul Bedjan, in Budge's Chronography (1932), source.² This is the closest thing in the Chronography to an explanation of why the numbers differ — and it is not Bar Hebraeus's, but his nineteenth-century editor's, and it names the cause as the author's free use of several text-traditions, expressly not Jewish corruption. Bar Hebraeus's own textual awareness is of the same neutral cast: at the disputed "second Kainan" he notes only that "EUSEBIUS doth not reckon this KAINAN… neither doth the Hebrew Book… and our Syrian Book doth not. But LUKE… mentioneth him in the Gospel" — a flat collation of who has the name and who lacks it, with no suggestion that anyone cut it out.

Notes

• Why he is here — and what he is not. Bar Hebraeus is the witness the modern deflation list names but cannot cash. In his ICC 2018 paper (p. 122) Henry B. Smith Jr. writes that "Julian of Toledo…, Jacob of Edessa…, Byzantine chronologist George Syncellus…, and Armenian annalist Bar Hebraeus… also made this claim" — that the proto-Masoretic chronology "was deliberately deflated by the rabbis" — but supports the inclusion only by cross-reference to his own earlier article, and quotes no words of Bar Hebraeus at all. The Chronography carries no such charge. Even the one Bar Hebraeus line later produced in the debate — "According to the Hebrew Testament there elapsed between the creation and Christ 1375 years less than according to the Septuagint" — comes from a different work (the Arabic Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum, via Pococke's Latin and Seyffarth) and is a bare difference-of-totals, not an accusation of tampering.³
• The "Armenian annalist" slip. Smith labels Bar Hebraeus the "Armenian annalist." He was Syriac Orthodox — the maphrian (primate) of the East — and wrote his Chronography in Syriac. The name "Bar Hebraeus" ("son of the Hebrew") points to family origin, not nationality. The misdescription is small but worth noting where his testimony is being weighed.
• What this shows for the argument. Like Isidore and Hrabanus Maurus on the inspiration legend, Bar Hebraeus held all the materials of the charge — the longer Septuagint chronology, the divergent and shorter Hebrew total, the textual awareness of the "second Kainan" — and inferred no malice from any of them. At the far end of the strand a major chronicler simply records the divergence; the leap to deliberate anti-Christian deflation is supplied by the modern secondary list, not by him. He is thus a corrective to that list and a datum for the Genesis 5/11 chronology argument (assessment: contested): the chain of "witnesses who charged deliberate deflation" is shorter, and thinner, than it is made to look. He shares the antediluvian genealogy with the Flood doctrine's timeline.
• His other page. Bar Hebraeus also figures on the Septuagint-origin side, for a wholly different body of his work: his Gospel commentary the Storehouse of Mysteries (Awṣar Rāzē), where at Luke 2:25 he tells the Simeon-the-Just legend — and welds the translator-legend to the "father of Ben Sira" guess the earlier Syriac list-makers had kept separate. That is a distinct claim about a distinct text; the two pages do not overlap.
• Sourcing. Cited from the standard English translation, E. A. Wallis Budge, The Chronography of Gregory Abû'l Faraj… Bar Hebraeus (Oxford, 1932), from Paul Bedjan's Syriac edition; the patriarchal section runs the opening pages (Bedjan's bracketed pages [3]–[7]). The modern listing of Bar Hebraeus as a deflation witness, and the Historia Compendiosa line, are in Smith's ICC 2018 paper and his Associates for Biblical Research articles.

Sources