Sin, Iniquity, Wickedness, and Rebellion in the Peshitta to Isaiah and Jeremiah.

The Peshitta is considered a fairly literal translation. However, the attitude of the translator (using the singular here for simplicity) of Isaiah and Jeremiah to his Hebrew Vorlage was complex: he almost always preserved the original message, but exercised literary initiative, selecting lexical equivalents sometimes inconsistently, sometimes with great precision, sometimes disrupting rhetorical structure, sometimes making additions to render opaque Hebrew clearly. He did not see his text as 'sacred' at any point, nor did later scribes who introduced further small additions and modifications. The range of Syriac vocabulary employed is wide: there is no evidence of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]