--- title: "The East Syriac Psalm Headings in Manuscript — Rooy 2019" description: "The paper asks how far the oldest surviving witness to the East Syriac Psalm headings, 6t1 (c." authors: ["Herrie van Rooy"] year: 2019 venue: "Old Testament Essays 32" source: "https://ote-journal.otwsa-otssa.org.za/index.php/journal/article/view/303" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Old Testament Essays)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rooy-2019-east-syriac-psalm-headings-manuscript/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rooy-2019-east-syriac-psalm-headings-manuscript/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2019/page/5/) / The East Syriac Psalm Headings in Manuscript 18>8dt1: Manchester, John Rylands Library, Rylands Syriac Manuscript 4 # The East Syriac Psalm Headings in Manuscript 18>8dt1: Manchester, John Rylands Library, Rylands Syriac Manuscript 4 **Authors:** Herrie van Rooy · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** Old Testament Essays 32 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Old Testament Essays)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2019/v32n2a22) · [PDF](https://ote-journal.otwsa-otssa.org.za/index.php/journal/article/download/303/223) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2978567237) **Citations:** 1 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary The paper asks how far the oldest surviving witness to the East Syriac Psalm headings, 6t1 (c. AD 600, Eastern headings in Western orthography), can be trusted as the original form. The long-standing view of Vosté and Bloemendaal was that these headings stayed stable and mainly got shorter over time. Van Rooy tests that view with a neglected witness, 18>8dt1. It is a 1727 copy made in China from a lost Eastern exemplar whose colophon dates it to AD 752/3, about four centuries earlier than any other Eastern source. He compares its headings with 6t1 and 12t4, a 12th-century Baghdad manuscript, psalm by psalm. He then checks the variants against later manuscripts, the printed editions and Theodore of Mopsuestia's commentary, which the headings summarise. The comparison shows that 6t1 sometimes reflects early revisions, while 18>8dt1 has almost no unique readings. The study therefore replaces "trust the oldest copy" with agreement rules among the three key witnesses, which matters for any future critical edition. ## Key points - 18>8dt1 is held by the John Rylands Library in Manchester, where it is catalogued as number 4 among the Rylands Syriac manuscripts. Its siglum was revised from 18\<13dt1 once the colophon was read as giving year 1064 of the Greeks (AD 752/3), under Cyprian, metropolitan of Nisibis. - The Peshitta Institute siglum encodes three things: century, manuscript type, and a serial number. - For example, 6t1 is the first 6th-century Psalms manuscript (London, BL Add. 17,110). - 12t4 (Baghdad, Chaldean Patriarchate MS 1113) gives four headings per psalm, labelled Eusebius, Athanasius, Theodore and "Hebrew". - The author's earlier critical edition drew on 17 manuscripts plus three 19th-century printed editions. - Across the variants, 18>8dt1 has a single unique reading (Ps 86), whereas 12t4 has many. Some headings, such as the double heading of Ps 115 and the heading of Ps 126, show stepwise shortening in later witnesses. ## Interesting ideas - The paper turns three witnesses into simple decision rules: when two agree against the third, the pair is taken as nearer the original, so the oldest source does not win automatically. — For Mova (learn): Silver trees could be accepted by two-of-three parser agreement rather than by deferring to one "senior" parser, with the overruled witness logged per arc. - A witness's reliability is judged by how rarely it stands alone. The almost unique-free 18>8dt1 counts as closer to the source than the variant-rich 12t4. — For Mova (learn): Counting each witness parser's solitary decisions gives a cheap per-parser trust score for weighting votes and choosing which outputs go to the LLM teacher. - Disputed readings are checked against an independent external source, Theodore's commentary, which the headings are meant to summarise. A reading the commentary does not support is judged secondary. — For Mova (world): A frame or entity claim extracted from text could be validated against compiled knowledge (WordNet/Wikidata facts), with unsupported claims flagged rather than silently kept. - The Chinese copyist left blank space where the exemplar was unreadable instead of guessing. — For Mova (answer): Readers should expose an explicit "unresolved" slot when a parse or coreference link is unclear, which keeps the explanation chain honest instead of filling it with a guess. - The paper traces how a double heading was shortened in different directions across later copies, each keeping a different part. — For Mova (back): This gives a model for measuring what the text → graph → text compressor drops: compare the regenerated summary with the full graph and record which sub-frames were lost. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{rooy2019east, title = {{The East Syriac Psalm Headings in Manuscript 18>8dt1: Manchester, John Rylands Library, Rylands Syriac Manuscript 4}}, author = {Rooy, Herrie van}, booktitle = {Old Testament Essays 32}, year = {2019}, doi = {10.17159/2312-3621/2019/v32n2a22}, url = {https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2019/v32n2a22} } ``` - [← previous The DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeldes-2019-disrpt-2019-shared-task-elementary/) - [next → The Effect of Translationese in Machine Translation Test Sets](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhang-2019-effect-translationese-machine-translation-test/) - [↑ back to papers of 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2019/page/5/) ## References 2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Baethgen, Friedrich. “Der Psalmencommentar des Theodorus von Mopsuestia in syrischer Bearbeitung.” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 5 (1885): 53-101. https://doi.org/10.1515/zatw.1885.5.1.53. Bloemendaal, Willem. The Headings of the Psalms in the East Syrian Church. Leiden: Brill, 1960. Coakley, James F. “A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75 (1993): 105-207. https://doi.org/10.7227/bjrl.75.2.2. De Sacy, A. I. Sylvestre. “Notice d’un manuscrit syriaque écrit à la Chine, contenant une portion de la version Syriaque de l’Ancien Testament, des Cantiques, e diverses priéres.” Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothéque du Roi XII (1831): 277-286. Hill, Robert C. Diodore of Tarsus: Commentary on Psalms 1-51. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 9. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. Hill, Robert C. Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on Psalms 1-81. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 5. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. Mingana, Alphonse. “The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East: a New Document.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 9 (1925): 297-371. https://doi.org/10.7227/bjrl.9.2.2. Peshitta Institute. List of Old Testament Peshitta Manuscripts (Preliminary issue). Leiden: Brill, 1961. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1515/zatw.1885.5.1.53) 2. Van Rooy, Herculaas F. The East Syriac Psalm Headings: A Critical Edition, Texts and Studies: Third Series 8. Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press 2013. https://doi.org/ 10.31826/9781463234140. Van Rooy, Herculaas F. “The ‘Hebrew’ Psalm headings in the Syriac manuscript 12t4.” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 25 (1999): 225-237. Van Rooy, Herculaas. Studies on the Syriac Apocryphal Psalms. Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Vosté, Jacques-Marie. “Sur les titres des psaumes dans le Pešitta, surtout d’aprés la recension orientale.” Biblica 25 (1944): 210-235. Walter, Donald M. The Book of Psalms. The Old Testament in Syriac II 3. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Wright, William. Catalogue of Syriac MSS in the British Museum acquired after the year 1838 I. London: British Museum, 1870. [↗](https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463234140)