An edition and annotated translation of a Syriac manuscript in the British Library, dated 719 AD and containing the Books of Samuel in the version of the Syrian Orthodox scholar Jacob, bishop of Edessa (c. 640-708).
The first volume also contains a detailed introduction concerning the nature of Jacob's revisions of the Peshitta text, which uses the Septuagint version and especially the Lucianic recension.
Jacob of Edessa's bible version provides an insight into attitudes to the biblical text among Christians in the Near East in the early Islamic period.

The Peshitta is probably the earliest translation of the whole Old Testament into a Semitic idiom. It displays an impressive balance between fidelity to the structure and sense of the Hebrew original and sensitivity to the preferences of the receptor language. This book considers ten key topics in Syriac syntax and exhaustively considers their patterns as they occur in the Peshitta of 1 Kings. Old rules of grammar are refined, new rules formulated, and wider issues of translation method considered. This study is relevant to Syriac specialists, textual critics and biblical scholars alike. It...