Aleppine Melkite Psalter with bilingual Latin-Arabic titling and the rare apocryphal Psalm 151

[Biblia arabica - VT - Psalmi]. Melkite scribe of Aleppo. Manuscript Psalter in Arabic, with Ten Canticles and Psalm 151 (Melkite use).

€ 28.000,00

A vivid witness to Melkite devotion in Ottoman Syria, marked by a rare bilingual title and the inclusion of Psalm 151. The Psalter opens with the Psalms of David, the scribe introducing the text in Arabic and adding a Latin heading of his own hand, “Liber Arabicus Psalmorum David”, a concise statement of the manuscript’s dual cultural horizon between Aleppo’s Arabic Melkite tradition and the pull of Rome.

At the close of the Psalms the scribe adds the apocryphal Psalm 151, “outside the number”, attributed to David’s victory over Goliath, a text preserved in the Septuagint and Syriac yet only seldom encountered in Arabic manuscripts, thus underscoring the manuscript’s rarity and the breadth of its textual witness. The volume proceeds to the complete cycle of the Ten Canticles in the Byzantine Arabic recension: the two songs of Moses, the songs of Hannah, Habakkuk, Isaiah, and Jonah, followed by the hymns of the Three Young Men in the Furnace, the second in a shortened form, and concluding with the Magnificat and the Benedictus, reflecting a liturgical sequence characteristic of Byzantine parish and monastic practice in Arabic.

A partly erased Latin ownership on the title-page, “Don … pet' melichita alepino”, fixes the milieu as the Melkite community of Aleppo and confirms local use; the bilingual habits of the scribe further point to the eighteenth century’s Catholic currents within the Melkite world.

Combining Psalms, Canticles, the exceptional presence of Psalm 151, and explicit Aleppine Melkite provenance, the manuscript encapsulates the encounter of Byzantine liturgical continuity with Roman influence in an Arabic-speaking ecclesial setting.