On Genesis

Questions on Genesis #

The present edition #

This is a bilingual edition of Philo of Alexandria’s Questions and Answers on Genesis in Classical Armenian and English. The work is preserved thanks to a Classical Armenian translation that is thought to be a product of the first half of the 5th century, together with translations of various of Philo’s other works. The translation survived in a manuscript dated 1296, copied from an earlier manuscript at the request of King Hetum II, which later came into the possession of the Armenian Archbishop of Lviv by whom it was endowed to the Monastery of San Lazzaro in 1821. In 1826, Fr. Pascal Aucher (Harutyun Avgerian) of San Lazzaro published the text alongside his own Latin translation. The English translation presented here is from the 1953 Loeb edition translated by Ralph Marcus. It is one of the few Loeb editions that presents the English text alone, given that only about 10% of the original Classical Greek text has survived. Therefore, we present here this bilingual edition, with the Classical Armenian text morphologically tagged and parsed.

References #

  1. Aucher, P. (1826). Platoni Yerkeri Hayeren t’argmanut’ean zhamanke. Banber Matenadarani, 10, 7-20.

  2. Hayes, C. (2017). “The Torah was not Given to Ministering Angels”: Rabbinic Aspirationalism. In C. Fonrobert, I. Rosen-Zvi, A. Shemesh & M. Vidas (Eds.), Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin (pp. 123-160). Brill.

  3. Leopardi, Y. (1898). P’iloni Yebrayets’woy Bank’ yerek’ dzev i loys yntsayeakk’. Bazmavep, 56, 473-478.

  4. Lévy, C. (2022). Philo of Alexandria. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman, eds.). URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/philo/.

  5. Lombardi, S. M. & Pontani, P. (Eds.) (2011). Studies on the Ancient Armenian Version of Philo’s Works (Studies of Philo of Alexandria: Vol. 6). Leiden-Boston: Brill.

  6. Philo. (1826). P’iloni yebrayets’woy mnats’ordk’ i hays vor en meknut’iwn tsnndots’ yev yelits. (Ed. & Trans. Fr. P. Aucher). Venice: The Monastery of San Lazzaro.

  7. Philo. (1953). Questions on Genesis. (Trans. Ralph Marcus). Loeb Classical Library 380. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.