Passing Down a Corpus of Reminders For the Peshiṭta and the Harklean Bibles

Among the many Syriac manuscripts that have come down to us are types of companion volumes known in Syriac as a ‘booklet’ (kurrāsā) of ‘terms’ (shmāhe), used as guides to the Syriac biblical versions and the Greek Fathers. Modern scholars sometimes refer to these volumes as the Syriac ‘Masora.’ The largest category of these ‘shmāhe booklets’ are large codices that constitute something akin to a shared ‘curriculum’ of excerpted biblical sample texts, in addition to an assortment of tracts. As it turns out, a central part of this ‘curriculum’ included reminders of how to read and interpret certain biblical passages. This article will present the first survey of these hundreds of glosses as they appear across every known model ‘shmāhe booklet.’ The resulting survey helps us better envision what the compilers of these intriguing volumes hoped to pass down and how their work relates to that of later biblical commentators such as Bar ʿEbroyo.