VOCABULARY FOR HUMAN ANATOMY IN THE EARLIEST SLAVONIC TRANSLATION OF BOOKS OF SAMUEL AND KINGS

The books of Samuel and Kings (1–4 Kingdoms) are among the earliest biblical books that were translated into Old Church Slavonic. At a comparatively early stage of the manuscript tradition the initial translation of the book – conventionally called archetype – split into chronographic and non-chronographic recensions. The exemplary witness of the non-chronographic recension is the so-called Turnovo or South Slavic Bible – manuscript F.I.461 kept in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg and dated to the second half of the fourteenth century1. The chronographic recension is registered in the Chronograph of the Archive (Jewish Chronicle or Chronographia Judaica) and in the First recension of the Letopisets Ellinskij. The first compilation is unambiguously connected with the name of Bulgarian tsar Simeon (893–927) and is usually dated to 921 according to the chronographikon it contains, while the latter features the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans and is related to the ruler’s ideology of Simeon’s successor tsar Petar (927–969). Based on this we can assume that the division between the chronographic and the non-chronographic recensions happened about the beginning of the tenth century. Another proof thereof is the different segmentation of the biblical text present in the two branches of the tradition (Тотоманова-Панева 2019а; Тотоманова-Панева 2019б). © 2024 Cyrillo-Methodian Research Centre of BAS. All rights reserved.