{"it":{"id":"TX046","kind":"text","sub":"Mandaean","name":"Ginza Rabba","place":"Oxford","date":"Compiled 2nd-7th c. CE (debated)","oldest":"mss. 16th c.+","inst":"Mss. in Bodleian and BnF [unverified]","lang":"Mandaic Aramaic","src":[244,527],"lat":51.754,"lon":-1.254,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The Mandaean Ginza Rabba says the body was built by lesser powers, the soul came from elsewhere.","why":"The scripture of one of the last surviving Gnostic faiths divides the human being between a body made by lesser powers and a soul from the World of Light.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Read the creation section.","rel":["TX038"],"hook":"In a Mandaean scripture, the first man lay on the ground unable to stand until a soul was fetched for him."},"S":{"244":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba"],"527":["Wikipedia: Ginza Rabba","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginza_Rabba"]},"rec":{"id":"TX046","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA145","a":"Body built by lesser powers as a vessel for a soul.","who":"Gnostic-interest writers","main":"Gnostic-type dualism.","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Ginza Rabba, Right Ginza (Lidzbarski 1925, header 'Rechter Teil 171,7-172,18', p.176)","q":"\"Da brachte ich die Seele aus dem Schatze des gewaltigen Lebens ... und warf sie in den Körper Adams\"","exact":"yes","tr":"M. Lidzbarski 1925 (German; author d.1928, PD in life+70 countries)","url":"https://archive.org/details/ginza-der-schatz","mo":"souls_in_bodies"},{"ref":"Ginza, Right Ginza (Lidzbarski, header 'Rechter Teil 240,14-241,18'; OCR page no. unclear)","q":"\"Ptahil warf in ihn (Adam) eine Art Geist von seinem eigenen Geiste\"","exact":"yes","tr":"M. Lidzbarski 1925","url":"https://archive.org/details/ginza-der-schatz","mo":"divine_blood_or_breath"}],"tr":[{"by":"M. Lidzbarski","yr":"1925","t":"Ginza: der Schatz","lic":"PD (life+70)","url":"https://archive.org/details/ginza-der-schatz"}],"mo":[{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"Ptahil forms Adam, soul from World of Light","n":"Gnostic-type","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba"},{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"P055","n":"Mandaean","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba"}],"tl":[{"comp":"compiled by 7th-8th c. CE","old":"oldest mss 16th c.+","pub":"Norberg 1815-16; Lidzbarski 1925","b":"S","url":"https://archive.org/details/ginza-der-schatz"}],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Gnostic-type dualism.","alternative_reading":"Body built by lesser powers as a vessel for a soul.","alt_proponent":"Gnostic-interest writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"none","key_theme":"Ptahil (demiurge) forms Adam's body; soul (nishimta) sent from World of Light","language":"Mandaic Aramaic","physical_object_institution":"Mss. in Bodleian and BnF [unverified]","composition_date":"Compiled 2nd-7th c. CE (debated)","oldest_ms_date":"mss. 16th c.+","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0088","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Ginza Rabba","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginza_Rabba"},{"id":"VTX046-3","t":"Ginza Rba: Mandaean creation story (PDF)","u":"https://libraryoflilith.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Mand-Creation_story_Ginza_Rba.pdf"}],"sum":"# The Ginza Rabba: The Mandaean Great Treasure and the Soul Thrown Into the Body\n\n\"Who has made me live in the Tibil, who has thrown me into the body's trunk?\" The voice is a soul's, complaining. In the great scripture of the Mandaeans, the soul is a being of light carried down from its home against its will and shut inside a human body, which the text calls an \"inn\" and, more bluntly, \"the stinking body.\" \"Why did you carry me away from abode into captivity,\" it asks, \"and cast me into the stinking body?\"\n\nThe book is the Ginza Rabba, or Ginza Rba, \"the Great Treasure\", the longest and most important holy book of Mandaeism, one of the last surviving faiths of the ancient Gnostic type. Much of what follows comes from a doctoral thesis submitted at University College London by Sabah Aldihisi, who translated the Ginza's book of creation directly from a manuscript and compared four others in the British Library.\n\n## A book in two directions\n\nThe Ginza is a big codex, in Aldihisi's description more than 654 pages, or 327 folios, written in Classical Mandaic, a form of Eastern Aramaic with its own script. It has two parts, \"each part opposite the other.\" The Right Ginza has eighteen tractates on theology, creation, ethics, history and myth. The Left Ginza has three, all concerned with the fate of the soul after death; it is sometimes called the Book of Adam, or the Book of the Dead. In a traditional codex the Right Ginza runs one way, and turning the book upside down and back to front brings the reader to the Left.\n\nThe surviving manuscripts are late. The oldest Ginza in the British Library, Add. 23,600, has 315 folios and was bought from a Mrs Taylor in April 1860. A codex in the Bodleian Library at Oxford was copied by the scribe Adam Zihrun in 1529 and once belonged to the English philologist Thomas Marshall, whose servant gave it to the library in 1689 or 1690. The Bodleian also holds the Drower Collection, 56 Mandaean manuscripts obtained from the community by the scholar Lady Drower.\n\nHow old the texts themselves are is a long-running argument. Scholars such as Lidzbarski proposed that the Mandaeans existed before Christianity; others, like Pallis, preferred a date as late as the sixth century CE. Modern work treats the Ginza as a composite of different ages. One colophon claims that a copyist named Zazai of Gawazta copied important texts 368 years before the Arab conquest, but the calculation behind a third-century date is uncertain. The final compilation must come from Islamic times, since the book refers to the Arabs and the conquest.\n\n## Making Adam\n\nThe Ginza contains no fewer than seven accounts of creation, in different tractates. The fullest is the third tractate of the Right Ginza, the largest of all, called \"The Mystery and the First Book of the First Living Doctrine.\"\n\nIn Aldihisi's summary, the order of the world begins in the World of Light. One of its beings, Abatur, the Third Life, opened the gate of that world and gazed down into the black waters, \"and immediately his counterpart was formed in the black waters.\" This was Ptahil, the Fourth Life. \"Come, come, Ptahil,\" Abatur told him, \"you are the one whom I saw in the black waters.\" Ptahil went down, consolidated the earth and created the material world.\n\nMeanwhile, the Lord of Darkness made a kingdom of his own, full of monsters, dragons and evil spirits, \"the Seven,\" the planets, and \"the Twelve,\" the signs of the zodiac, with their mother Ruha, the goddess of darkness. Ptahil, with Ruha and her sons the planets helping him, set out to make the first man.\n\nThe body would not stand. In Aldihisi's words, Ptahil and his helpers \"could not succeed to make him stand on his feet.\" So Ptahil went back up to the World of Light and brought from his father the nišimta, the soul, and cast it into Adam's body. \"Only then Adam stood on his feet and became aware of his existence.\" The beings of light then created Hawa, Eve, as his wife. Ruha and the planets tried to seduce Adam and hold him in the world; the messenger of light, Manda d-Hiia, \"Knowledge of Life,\" prevented them.\n\n## The soul's way home\n\nFor the Mandaeans the story explains the human condition. The body is the work of lower powers; the soul is a spark from somewhere better. The heart of their religion, Aldihisi writes, is the deliverance of the soul from the perishable body.\n\nWhen a Mandaean dies, the soul leaves the body and begins a long journey through the maṭarata, the watch-houses or places of purification, before it is weighed on the scales of Abatur and carried by ships of light to the World of Light. Those who die violently are said to suffer long delays there. Three days after a death, priests perform the masiqta, the \"ascension\" ceremony, to help the soul on its way, and recitations continue at fixed intervals until the end of its forty-five-day journey. At the end the soul meets its own heavenly double: \"I go to meet my image and my image comes to me: it caresses and embraces me as if I were returning from captivity.\"\n\n## Readings\n\nScholars read the Ginza as a form of Gnostic dualism, related in some ways to the Nag Hammadi texts, with the familiar figure of a lesser creator who cannot finish his own work. Some modern writers with Gnostic interests read it more literally, as evidence that the human body was built by lesser powers as a vessel for a soul. That is interpretation; nothing in the text supplies measurable data for it.\n\nWhat the book offers instead is an image. Picture Adam as the Ginza describes him: a finished body lying on the ground, shaped by the rulers of the planets, unable to rise, until a spark is brought down from the light and he opens his eyes.","qs":["The body could not stand without the soul. What does that say about what a person is?","Scholars disagree about the Ginza's age by centuries. Does the date change its meaning?","Why might a faith picture death as a journey through watch-houses?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Parwanaya_2015_Ahvaz_01.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parwanaya_2015_Ahvaz_01.jpg","title":"Parwanaya 2015 Ahvaz 01.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Yuhana Nashmi (The Worlds of Mandaean Priests)","cap":"Mr Salem Choheili is Shkanda (deacon) and highly respected for his learning and teaching. Here he reads from Ginza Rba - Smala (The Mandaean Holy Book – left si"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Ganzibra_Dakhil_Mandi_023.jpg/1280px-Ganzibra_Dakhil_Mandi_023.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ganzibra_Dakhil_Mandi_023.jpg","title":"Ganzibra Dakhil Mandi 023.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Akamanda","cap":"Ginza Rabba at the pulpit of the Ganzibra Dakhil Mandi This Ginza should not be touched by unpurified bare hands."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"mss. 16th c.+","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[323]},{"v":"Mandaic Aramaic","h":"Language","s":[323]}],"hs":{"323":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Ginza_Rabba"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX046.webp","w":750,"h":1125,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Parwanaya_2015_Ahvaz_01.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}