W.T. van Peursen

Linguistic Observations on the Hebrew Prayer of Manasseh from the Cairo Genizah

Among the so-called magical texts from the Cairo Genizah edited by Peter Schäfer and Shaul Shaked, the Cambridge fragments T.-S. K 1.144, T.-S. K 21.95, and T.-S. K 21.95P constitute a manuscript containing various prayers, most of which have “a mystico-magical character.”1 Among these prayers we find a Hebrew version of the Prayer of Manasseh2 previously known in Greek and Syriac.3 There is no relationship with Manasseh’s prayer found at Qumran (4Q381 33 8–11) edited by Eileen Schuller4 and investigated by William M. Schniedewind.5 One of the very few studies on the Genizah text is an article by