Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »From the passage it is clear that it refers to Christian teachers, and though one would not care to press the point, its occurrence alongside ruhbān may indicate that it referred to the ordinary clergy as distinct from the monks.
It was generally considered by the philologers as a genuine Ar word¹ derived from qassa ‘to seek after’ or ‘pursue a thing’, so that a qasīs is so called ‘because he follows the Book and its precepts’, al-Siǧistānī, 259. Obviously the word is the Syr qašīšā = [Grk] presbúteros, as has been generally recognized by Western scholars.² This word could hardly fail to be known to any Arab tribes which came into contact with the Christians of the North and East, and, as a matter of fact both forms of the word were borrowed into Ar, qaššā (cf. Aram qšʔ) as qass, and qašīšā as qassīs, while the Ḥadīṯ lā yuġayyir qassīs min qassīsiyyaẗ shows that they were not unacquainted with the abstract noun [Sur] qašīšūṯā. / We meet with the word in the early poetry,³ which shows it must have been an early borrowing, and as a matter of fact it occurs as a borrowing both in Eth [Gz] qasīs⁴ and in the SAr inscriptions (e.g. Glaser, 618, 67 – kbhw qssm ḏbmstlh),⁵ the ground of which Grimme, ZA, xxvi, 162, would take the word to be from a SAr source, though with little likelihood.«

1. But see al-Ǧawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 39. 2. Geiger, 51; Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, ii, 118; Freytag, Lex, sub voc.; Fraenkel, Vocab, 24; Fremdw, 275; Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 7; Horovitz, KU, 64; Mingana, Syr. Influence, 85. 3. Cf. Aġānī, xiii, 47, 170; xvi, 45. 4. Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge, 37; Pautz, Offenbarung, 136, n. 5. Cf. on it Praetorius in ZDMG, liii, 21; Rossini, Glossarium, 233.

west

–

deriv

–

Permanent link

http://www2.hf.uio.no/common/apps/permlink/permlink.php?app=polyglotta&context=record&uid=d9f6f361-06ff-11ee-937a-005056a97067

Choose languages

Choose images, etc.

Choose languages

Choose display