Rabbinic literature is the collective name for a diverse body of works created by Jewish intellectuals in ancient Judaea/Palestine and Babylonia in the second to eighth centuries c.e. It contains many loanwords from Greek and Latin.Footnote ¹ Most of these were in widespread use in contemporary Greek, but some are in fact quite rare in Greek literature, and their usage in rabbinic literature can illuminate not only the rabbinic passage but also the function and semantics of the word in the broader Greek-speaking world.

This note discusses one such case, the word sardîstôn, similar in meaning and usage to the word σαρδισμός discussed recently by Adam Gitner in this journal.Footnote ² It will add one more piece of rabbinic evidence for this word to the sources Gitner assembled.

As Gitner notes, sardismos is the name, in several Latin works of literary criticism, for a combination of more than one language or dialect in a sentence. It is a matter of some debate whether more than two languages must be present for sardismos to be properly used, and also whether these are separate languages or dialects of the same language. Quintilian (first century c.e.) uses the term disparagingly; the Christian author Cassiodorus (sixth century c.e.) uses it positively.Footnote ³

A relative of this word, sardîsṭôn (סרדיסטון), is found in a compilation known today as Exodus Rabbah. This compilation is made up of two distinct works: the first, known as Exodus Rabbah 1, is a tenth-century c.e. running commentary on Exodus based on earlier rabbinic materials and created in southern Italy. It is not discussed in this article. The second work (Exodus Rabbah 2) is earlier, and forms part of family of works known as ‘Late’ or ‘Tanhuman’ Midrash. The central stratum of this latter corpus is likely from the sixth century c.e.Footnote ⁴

In context, the homilist is attempting to make meaning of the Hebrew phrase ꜥēg̱el massēḵâ, found in Exodus 32:4, 8 and elsewhere. While the first word obviously means ‘calf’, what does the second word mean? The Septuagint translates χωνϵυτóς, ‘cast’ or ‘molten’, likely deriving the participle from the Hebrew root NSK, ‘libation’ or ‘pouring’.Footnote ⁵ The Aramaic targums translate using the Aramaic maṯḵāʾ, ‘metal’ or ‘molten’. Exodus 32:4, however, says that the calf was not molten: Aaron took the gold and fashioned it with an engraving tool (ḇa-ḥereṭ).Footnote ⁶ When explaining to Moses what he was doing, he simply says that he threw gold into the fire ‘and this calf came out’ (Exodus 32:24). Again, no mould is mentioned. The rabbis thus need to explain the meaning of the word massēḵâ differently. In this collection, three alternative readings are offered: one is that the numeric value of the word massēḵâ reflects the amount of gold in the calf. The second is that massēḵâ means ‘libation’, and, following Exodus 32:20, that the calf is a ‘bad drink for all generations’. The third is the focus of this note:

There are two rabbis named Isaac in rabbinic literature. One is a third-century rabbi, and the other is a late fourth-century c.e. Palestinian scholar. This dictum is likely attributed to the latter Isaac. A tradition in the Babylonian Talmud (Pesahim 114a) states that this Isaac’s name was Isaac, son of Phineas. But this statement is found only in Exodus Rabbah 2, which was likely created as a work no earlier than the sixth century c.e., and possibly later. The precise wording of the dictum cannot be securely dated, but it is likely not older than the work itself—and could possibly belong to an even later stratum of the work, or even to a scribal intervention. The identity of Isaac is thus not very useful for ascertaining when the term l ^e šôn sardîstôn entered rabbinic usage.

‘Rabbi Isaac’ translates the scriptural word massēḵâ with the rabbinic Hebrew words ‘this is how I will heal them’. This led the sixteenth-century Ottoman Jewish scholar Samuel Jaffe Ashkenazi to realize that ‘Rabbi Isaac’ is reading the biblical Hebrew word massēḵâ as if it were two words in Aramaic, māsē ḵâ ‘he heals here’.Footnote ⁸ The notion that animal sacrifice is the means for atoning for the sin of the calf is found in the earliest strata of rabbinic literature.Footnote ⁹ However, the idea that the word massēḵâ is the source for this notion, because it means ‘he heals here’ in Aramaic, is new to this homily. ‘Rabbi Isaac’ marks this reading as l ^e šôn sardîstôn.

In Ashkenazi’s edition of the work the term l ^e šôn sardîstôn had already been corrupted, much like the occurrences of the Greek word in Latin sources documented by Gitner. Lexicographers down to the twentieth century emended it in various ways which masked its true meaning.Footnote ¹⁰ The return of scholars to manuscript sources, together with the 1996 publication of the LSJ supplement, which first listed σαρδισμός, offered the opportunity both to ascertain that the term was in fact l ^e šôn sardîstôn and, as Nurit Shoval-Dudai noted, that it was related to σαρδισμός.Footnote ¹¹

The grammar of l ^e šôn sardîstôn shows, however, that it is not a direct loan from σαρδισμός. The form sardîstôn is analogous to loaned language terms in rabbinic literature, such as sûrîstôn (‘in Syrian’) and ’elênîstôn (‘in Greek’).Footnote ¹² These terms were loaned from the Greek adverbial forms Συριστί and Ἑλληνιστί, with the addition of the final [n] sound to close the syllable.Footnote ¹³ Sardîstôn then likely reflects the unattested Greek form *Σαρδιστί. Rather than referring to the rhetorical figure (‘a Sardianism’) it refers to the Sardian dialect (‘in Sardian speech’). None the less, both terms use the speech of the people of Sardis to refer to a multilingual phrase.

The notion that the Pentateuch and the Hebrew scriptures more broadly were multilingual works, and could be decoded using the lexicons of more than one language, predates the use of l ^e šôn sardîstôn in Exodus Rabbah by centuries. The Septuagint translates some Hebrew words as if they were transliterated Greek.Footnote ¹⁴ Rabbinic literature will sometimes read words in scripture as if they were from a different language, Greek or Aramaic, and occasionally glosses them with a note saying so explicitly: ‘it is in the Greek (or Arab) language’.Footnote ¹⁵ The rabbis believed that the linguistic diversity they found within the scriptures was the result of a multilingual revelation:

What exactly the ‘Roman’ and ‘Arab’ languages in this text refer to is a matter of some debate, but the fact of the multilingual revelation is clear.Footnote ¹⁷ For the rabbis in the second or third century, the multilingual nature of their scriptures was a point of pride. It is possible, therefore, that Cassiodorus’ affection for sardismos not only is a sign of his Byzantine cultural affinities but also reflects traces of the Jewish notion that the Torah contains more than one language.

The use of the term l ^e šôn sardîstôn, related to σαρδισμός but not identical to it, shows that a new term for this feature began to enter Jewish circles at some point. This difference indicates that the notion of ‘Sardian speech’ did not come to the rabbis through the Latin works of literary criticism that are available to us. Usage of the term without any definition shows that it must have had a broader-usage base than the minute number of Jews who may have had the capacity to read Latin books in Byzantine Palestine, because the homily was meant to be understood by its audience. L ^e šôn sardîstôn was thus apparently part of the spoken language of Byzantine Jews who used it to describe a feature of their scriptures of which they had been proud for centuries.