Baruch in Syriac

I got into one of those Biblical rabbitholes and pondered, hey: what's up with Baruch?

In the Masoretic / Protestant tradition, Baruch is an apocryphal book that doesn't belong in the Bible. In the Greek tradition, it's part of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, by the way, is itself different in both; the Greek tradition ends in Egypt and allows that Baruch is about equal to Jeremiah, thus making that whole text a Jeremiah-Baruch cowriting exercise. Presently scholarship agrees that the Greek Jeremiah accurately translates a text, from which the Masoretic has reassembled. Perhaps, exactly to exclude the Baruch parts.

In the Dead Sea is no Baruch, excepting the "Epistle of Jeremiah"... in Greek (7Q). On the other hand, the Hebrew behind Greek Jeremiah famously survives. So maybe they did have Baruch like they had Nehemiah, except not preserving the copies. Ehh. Qumran quotes Nehemiah where it doesn't seem to quote Baruch.

Anyway, off these merry texts went outside the Hellenistic world. Jerome didn't translate Baruch to Latin, since he didn't have the Hebrew; but somebody did, since its in the Vulgate now. Meanwhile it also went to the Syrians.

In modern scholarship, all those Baruch/periJeremiah "apocrypha" went fairly ignored in Syriac studies - until the late 2010s, at the latest. That's when (Atlanta, I think) a total amateur like myself stumbled into a session on "2 Baruch". 2 Baruch seems to have been very popular as an apocalyptic text out East, on par with the Revelation in North Africa. You'd think the other Baruch books, being lost in Hebrew and preserved in Greek, would be simply ignored in the East, like Jerome was hoping to ignore them West. Ah but then there's Paul of Tella (re)translating all the Greek stuff for his colinguists.

You can read about Liv Ingeborg Lied 2022 free of charge, thankfully. The Baruch corpus seems complex to me, like the "Nehemiah" book and Ezra corpus. The "Second Epistle" of Baruch in the East, is what Catholics refer as just "Baruch" and, before us, the Greeks had appended to Jeremiah and treated as part of that book. And yes: iggerta not kitaba (Arabic may well be "risala").

Seems that the "2 Baruch" apocalypse did indeed come to Syria first. In Syriac the letter is to Babylon, where the Greek after en had the dative forcing "in". Dr Lied, engaged with paratext, sees that as evidence that indeed the "second epistle" came after 2 Baruch which was for Babylon, thus forcing this translation. I don't think Lied takes seriously that the mistranslation inspired 2 Baruch's authorship; I wouldn't either.

BACKDATE 9/25