The Aramaic Levi-Comparing the Qumran Fragments with the Genizah Text

Among the extra-biblical texts from Qumran we find the so called Aramaic Levi, which can be described as a somewhat different variant of the “Testament of Levi,” a part of the larger Greek text “The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.” Aramaic Levi, however, was already known from the Cairo Genizah. The following article is a linguistic comparison between the Qumran text and the version from the Cairo Genizah. As Klaus Beyer has noticed, there are a lot of non-Hasmonean spellings and words in the Genizah text, but most of Beyer’s examples are from parts of the text that are not preserved in the Qumran fragments. Comparing the two versions, we now note that the deviations are of two kinds. As expected,
the Genizah text often follows a later language than Qumran. This applies in particular to orthographic features and the use of status emphaticus without the definite sense. But in other places the Genizah text represents a language older than Hasmonean Aramaic, which we interpret as an adaptation to Biblical Aramaic and sometimes to Hebrew.