ARAMAIC
(Ar·a·maʹic).
An ancient Semitic language having a close relationship with Hebrew and originally spoken by the Aramaeans. (See ARAM.) With the passing of time, however, it came to embrace various dialects (some of them viewed as separate languages) and enjoyed wide use, especially in southwestern Asia. Aramaic was employed particularly from the second millennium B.C.E. to about 500 C.E. It is named at Ezra 4:7 and Daniel 2:4, and is one of the three languages in which the Bible was originally written.
The Aramaic portions of the Scriptures include Ezra 4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12-26; Jeremiah 10:11 and Daniel 2:4b to 7:28. Aramaic words also appear in Genesis, Esther, Job, certain Psalms, The Song of Solomon, Jonah and the Hebrew parts of Daniel. The Hebrew book of Job is strongly Aramaic and Ezekiel shows Aramaic influences. Quite a number of Aramaic proper and common nouns are found in the Christian Greek Scriptures, and particularly do Aramaic expressions appear in the Gospel accounts by Mark and Matthew.
All of this is not surprising, for the Hebrews had close contact with the Aramaeans and with the Aramaic language throughout their Biblically recorded history. In fact, the progenitor of the nation of Israel, Jacob (or Israel), was referred to as a “perishing Syrian,” or “Aramaean.” (Deut. 26:5) Jacob had sojourned for twenty years in Aram with his Aramaean father-in-law Laban and could therefore be called a Syrian or Aramaean. Furthermore, his mother was an Aramaean, being brought from an Aramaean district to marry his father Isaac. (Gen. 24:1-4, 10) Among the earliest renditions of the Hebrew Scriptures into other languages were the Aramaic Targums, though they were not put into writing until several centuries after the production of the Greek Septuagint Version commenced, about 280 B.C.E.
The Melqart stele is possibly the oldest extant example of Aramaic outside of the Bible and it goes back to perhaps the ninth century B.C.E. The next oldest appears to be the Zenjirli inscriptions of the eighth century B.C.E., in one of which Tiglath-pileser (III) is mentioned. (2 Ki. 15:29) There are other ancient specimens of Aramaic, including the fifth century B.C.E. papyri discovered on the Nile River island of Elephantine.
THE LANGUAGE
Aramaic, Hebrew and Phoenician comprised the northern division of the Semitic family of languages, which seem to have been the only ones written with an alphabet in early times. Though Aramaic differs considerably from Hebrew, it is a cognate language having the same letters in its alphabet with the same names as the Hebrew. Like Hebrew, it is written from right to left and, originally, the Aramaic script was consonantal. However, the Aramaic employed in the Bible was vowel-pointed later by the Masoretes, just as they vowel-pointed the Hebrew. Quite a number of Aramaic words found their way into the Hebrew language and even the modern form of the Hebrew letters, termed “square,” may derive from Aramaic. On the other hand, Aramaic has been influenced by its contact with other languages. Not only are various Hebrew, Akkadian and Persian proper names of localities and persons found in Biblical Aramaic, but it shows Hebrew influence in religious terms, Akkadian influence particularly in political and financial terms, and Persian influence in such terms as those relating to political and legal matters.
Aramaic, in addition to having the same script as Hebrew, bears a similarity to it in verbal, nominal and pronominal inflections. The verbs have two tense aspects, the imperfective (denoting incompleted action) and the perfective (signifying completed action), Aramaic employs singular, dual and plural nouns and has two genders, the masculine and the feminine. It differs from other Semitic languages by displaying a preference for the vowel sound a, and in other ways, including certain consonantal preferences, such as d for z and t for sh.
Basic divisions
Aramaic is generally divided into Western and Eastern groups. However, from a historical standpoint the following four groups have been recognized: Old Aramaic, Official Aramaic, Levantine Aramaic and Eastern Aramaic. It has been suggested that likely various dialects of Aramaic were spoken around and within the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia during the second millennium B.C.E. A difference between early forms of Aramaic and Hebrew may be noted at Genesis 31:47. After Jacob and Laban effected a reconciliation, a heap of stones was set up as a witness between them. Laban called it Jeʹgar-sa·ha·duʹtha in Aramaic (Syrian), while Jacob called it Galʹe·ed in Hebrew, both expressions meaning “witness heap.”
Old Aramaic is a name applied to certain inscriptions discovered in northern Syria and said to date from the tenth to the eighth centuries B.C.E. Gradually, however, a new dialect of Aramaic became the lingua franca or the international auxiliary language during the time of the Assyrian Empire, supplanting Akkadian as the language used for official governmental correspondence with outlying areas of the empire. In view of its use, this standard form of Aramaic is referred to as “Official Aramaic.” It continued to be employed during the time Babylon was the world power (625-539 B.C.E.) and thereafter, during the time of the Persian Empire (538-331 B.C.E.). Especially did it then enjoy wide usage, being the official language of government and business over a wide area, as archaeological discoveries attest, for it appears in dockets on cuneiform tablets, on ostraca, papyri, seals, coins, in inscriptions on stone, and so forth. These artifacts have been found in such lands as Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Anatolia, northern Arabia and regions as far N as the Ural Mountains and to the E as distant as Afghanistan and Kurdistan. The use of Official Aramaic continued during the Hellenistic period (330-30 B.C.E.).
It seems that it is this Official Aramaic that is found in the writings of Ezra, Jeremiah and Daniel. The Scriptures also give evidence of the fact that Aramaic was a lingua franca of those ancient times. Thus, in the eighth century B.C.E. an appointed spokesman for King Hezekiah of Judah, appealed to Assyrian King Sennacherib’s representative Rabshakeh, saying: “Speak, please, to your servants in the Syrian [Aramaean, and hence Aramaic] language, for we are listening; and do not speak to us in the Jews’ language in the ears of the people that are on the wall.” (Isa. 36:11; 2 Ki. 18:26) The officials of Judah understood Aramaic, or Syrian, but evidently it was not understood by the common people among the Hebrews at that time in Jerusalem.
A number of years after the Jews returned from Babylonian exile Ezra the priest read the book of the law to Jews assembled in Jerusalem, and various Levites explained it to the people, Nehemiah 8:8 stating: “They continued reading aloud from the book, from the law of the true God, it being expounded, and there being a putting of meaning into it; and they continued giving understanding in the reading.” This expounding or interpreting may have involved paraphrasing the Hebrew text into Aramaic, Aramaic possibly having been adopted by the Hebrews when in Babylon. However, the expounding could have involved exposition so that the Jews, even if understanding the Hebrew, would comprehend the deep significance of what was being read.
WHAT LANGUAGE DID JESUS SPEAK WHEN ON EARTH?
On this question there is considerable difference of opinion among scholars. However, concerning languages used in Palestine when Jesus Christ was on earth, Professor G. Ernest Wright states: “Various languages were undoubtedly to be heard on the streets of the major cities. Greek and Aramaic were evidently the common tongues, and most of the urban peoples could probably understand both even in such ‘modern’ or ‘western’ cities as Caesarea and Samaria where Greek was the more common. Roman soldiers and officials might be heard conversing in Latin, while orthodox Jews may well have spoken a late variety of Hebrew with one another, a language that we know to have been neither classical Hebrew nor Aramaic, despite its similarities to both.” Commenting further, on the language spoken by Jesus Christ, Professor Wright says: “The language spoken by Jesus has been much debated. We have no certain way of knowing whether he could speak Greek or Latin, but in his teaching ministry he regularly used either Aramaic or the highly Aramaized popular Hebrew. When Paul addressed the mob in the Temple, it is said that he spoke Hebrew (Acts 21:40). Scholars generally have taken this to mean Aramaic, but it is quite possible that a popular Hebrew was then the common tongue among the Jews.”—Biblical Archaeology, p. 240.
It is possible that Jesus and his early disciples, such as the apostle Peter, at least at times spoke Galilean Aramaic, Peter being told on the night Christ was taken into custody: “Certainly you also are one of them, for, in fact, your dialect gives you away.” (Matt. 26:73) This may have been said because the apostle was using Galilean Aramaic at the time, though that is not certain and he may have been speaking a Galilean Hebrew that differed dialectically from that employed in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Judea. Earlier, when Jesus came to Nazareth in Galilee and entered the synagogue there, he read from the prophecy of Isaiah, evidently as written in Hebrew, and then said: “Today this scripture that you just heard is fulfilled.” Nothing is said about Jesus’ translating this passage into Aramaic. So it is likely that persons present on that occasion could readily understand Biblical Hebrew. (Luke 4:16-21) It may also be noted that Acts 6:1, referring to a time shortly after Pentecost 33 C.E., mentions Greek-speaking Jews and Hebrew-speaking Jews in Jerusalem.
Professor Harris Birkeland (in The Language of Jesus, 1954, pp. 10, 11) points out that Aramaic’s being the written language of Palestine when Jesus was on earth does not necessarily mean that it was spoken by the masses, and the fact that the Elephantine papyri belonging to a Jewish colony in Egypt were written in Aramaic does not prove that it was their chief or common tongue in their homeland, for Aramaic was then an international literary language. Of course, the Christian Greek Scriptures contain a number of Aramaisms, Jesus using some Aramaic words, for instance. However, as Birkeland argues, perhaps Jesus ordinarily spoke the popular Hebrew, while occasionally using Aramaic expressions.
While it may not be provable, as Birkeland contends, that the common people were illiterate as far as Aramaic was concerned, it does seem that when Luke, an educated physician, records that Paul spoke to the Jews ‘in Hebrew’ and when the apostle said the voice from heaven spoke to him ‘in Hebrew,’ a form of Hebrew was actually meant (though perhaps not the ancient Hebrew) and not Aramaic.—Acts 22:2; 26:14.
Lending further support to the use of a form of Hebrew in Palestine when Jesus Christ was on earth are early indications that the apostle Matthew first wrote his Gospel account in Hebrew. For instance, Eusebius (of the third and fourth centuries C.E.) said: “The evangelist Matthew delivered his Gospel in the Hebrew tongue.” And Jerome (of the fourth and fifth centuries C.E.) stated: “Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an Apostle, first of all the Evangelists, composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters, for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed. . . . Furthermore, the Hebrew itself is preserved to this day in the library at Caesarea which the Martyr Pamphilus so diligently collected.” (Catalogue of Ecclesiastical Writers) Hence, Jesus Christ as a man on earth could well have used a form of Hebrew and a dialect of Aramaic.—See HEBREW.