Aramaic

“ That this quality, which renders it suitable for a clear and limpid prose style, is not the result of Greek influence may be seen by the Mandaean, on which Greek has left no mark. In its attempts to express everything clearly Aramaic often becomes prolix,—for example, by using additional personal and demonstrative pronouns. The contrast between Aramaic as the language of prose and Hebrew as the language of poetry is one which naturally strikes us, but we must beware of carrying it too far. Even the Aramaeans were not wholly destitute of poetical talent. ”

“ They include the Arama’ic, Hebræo-Phœnician, and Arabic, which are much more alike than the Aryan tongues. Assyrio-Babylonian occupies a peculiar position between the Northern and Southern Semitic groups.
Aramaic (from the Hebrew Arâm—highlands) was spoken in northern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. A dialect of it, the Jews gradually adopted after their return from captivity at Babylon (536 B.C.) , retaining the Hebrew as their sacred language, but speaking and writing in Aramaic somewhat modified by Greek. Aramaic, therefore, was the tongue in which our Lord and his disciples conversed. ”

“ The three Synoptic Gospels are based upon one original Gospel written in the Aramaic language. A large number of verbal variations can thus be accounted for. They might have sprung from different renderings of the same Aramaic original, and various passages derived from oral tradition might have been added to the original Gospel when it was translated. It has been held by some that there was at least an Aramaic document behind Mark, if there was not an Aramaic original employed by all the Synoptics. The different forms of this hypothesis can be described as the theory of an Aramaic original. ”

“ To seize the full meaning, or meanings, we must be able to retranslate the Greek words into the original Aramaic expression. It is well known that in some circumstances the Aramaic dialects use the phrase 'a son of man' for 'a human being '; moreover, there is an undoubted connexion of some kind between our Lord's use of 'The Son of Man' and the very similar phrase in Daniel's Vision [8] which itself was written in Aramaic. For many reasons, therefore, we turn to the Syriac renderings of ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου with some justifiable expectation of obtaining help. ”

“ The Semitic family is divided into three branches, the Aramaic, the Hebraic, and the Arabic.280
[pg 276] The Aramaic occupies the north, including Syria, Mesopotamia, and part of the ancient kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria. It is known to us chiefly in two dialects, the Syriac and Chaldee. The former name is given to the language which has been preserved to us in a translation of the Bible (the Peshito281) ascribed to the second century, and in the rich Christian literature dating from the fourth. ”

“ The presence of short inscriptions in Aramaic on a few contract-tablets naturally raised hopes, in the early days of decipherment, of finding some check upon the reading of cuneiform. So far as these went they were by no means inconsistent with the readings of the cuneiform. ”

“ Biblical Aramaic, as also the language of the Palmyrene and Nabataean inscriptions, may be described as an older form of Western Aramaic. The opinion that the Palestinian Jews brought their Aramaic dialect direct from Babylon—whence the incorrect name “Chaldee”—is altogether untenable.
We may now trace somewhat farther the development of Western Aramaic in Palestine; but unhappily few of the sources from which Aramaic of Targums, etc. we derive our information can be thoroughly trusted. ”

“ No part of the Bible has called forth a greater diversity of opinions than the Song of Solomon, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the book holds so unique a position in the Old Testament, that the general analogy of Hebrew literature is a very inadequate key to the verbal difficulties, the artistic structure, and the general conception and purpose of the poem. In point of language the departures from ordinary Hebrew are almost always in the direction of Aramaic. Many forms unique in Biblical Hebrew are at once explained by the Aramaic dialects, but not a few are still obscure. ”

“ Yahweh said to me, Go up against this land and destroy it.
26 And Eliakim son of Hilkiah, and Shebnah, and Joah said to Rab-shakeh, Please speak to your servants in the Aramaic language, because we understand it. Do not speak to us in the Judean language so that the people on the wall can hear. ”

“ In that country, where the native writing was so formidable to the learner, the Aramaic language and script may well have appeared peculiarly serviceable. Thus they were employed, and frequently, even by indigenous Egyptians. But we need not doubt that, in Egypt, Aramaic was also spoken by many who had migrated from Syria; and this must be assumed to have been the case with the Jewish colonists mentioned. The fact is now established that these Jews who had come to Egypt before the Persian period were military colonists, and were often referred to in documents as “Aramaeans.” ”

“ This hypothesis is not intrinsically improbable—and in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, “to be” actually is hāwā—but it should be noted that in adopting it we admit that, using the name Hebrew in the historical sense, Yahweh is not a Hebrew name. And, inasmuch as nowhere in the Old Testament, outside of Exod. iii., is there the slightest indication that the Israelites connected the name of their God with the idea of “being” in any sense, it may fairly be questioned whether, if the author of Exod. ”

“ Besides, this hypothesis, as it was soon seen, does not explain the peculiar relation of these gospels to each other in respect to coincidences and differences. Hence various modifications were proposed—an original Aramaic gospel with various Greek translations, this original Aramaic gospel variously increased with new matter, etc. In a word, the form of these assumed original documents was hypothetically explained from the actual form of our three synoptic gospels ”

“ In fact, a hybrid work in two languages would be a literary monstrosity. In view of the apparent unity of the entire work, the only possible explanation seems to be that the book was written at first all in Hebrew, but for the convenience of the general reader whose vernacular was Aramaic, a translation, possibly from the same pen as the original, was made into Aramaic. ”

“ Hebrew literature, so scantily represented for this period, has to mourn this great loss. A page of fragments, gathered from the Talmud and 195the Midrāshīm, [279] is all that we can, with some occasional hesitation, plausibly regard as genuine. There is indeed a small work, called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, consisting of two series of proverbs, one in Aramaic, and one in Hebrew. ”

“ This land was called Aram and the ancient language spoken there, the Aramaic. Between Phœnician and Aramaic the connection is close. The Aramaic took the place of the Phœnician language, when the Phœnicians were edged out of Palestine westward over the Mediterranean. So we see that Arabic, which looks so strange and is so elegant and fantastic when embroidered on banners or traced on tiles or written on the beautiful mulberry-leaf paper of the Orient, really uses, in the main, the same alphabet that looks so plain and simple on the page you are reading! ”

“ The Scriptures of the Jews were written in Hebrew, the older language of the people; but a few chapters in Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic, which gradually replaced Hebrew as the vernacular of Palestine from the fifth century B.C. The Sacred Books comprise the Law, that is, the Five Books of Moses; the Prophets, under which name are included the older historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) as well as what we call the Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve, i.e. Minor Prophets) ”

“ But upon the hypothesis of Q as originally an Aramaic document, used by Matthew and Luke in Greek translations going back to different Aramaic texts, such an analysis becomes superfluous, because superseded by the analysis of Q into the two recensions, QMt and QLk.
THE ANALYSIS OF Q INTO QMt AND QLk
If Q was originally an Aramaic document, used by Matthew and Luke in Greek translations going back to different copies of the Aramaic original, it is fair to assume that these two translations would have had different histories. Q would always be growing, by the aid of oral tradition ”

“ The Aramaic portions of the literature under treatment comprise both the eastern and the western dialects. [1] Owing to the close mental exchange between the Palestinian and the Babylonian Jews, these dialects are often found inextricably interwoven, and cannot be distinguished lexicographically.
The subjects of this literature are as unlimited as are the interests of the human mind. ”

“ Cumulative testimony is furnished 459by the unquestioned adoption, in the time of Jesus, of the Aramaic characters in place of the old Hebrew in copies of the Bible text. The change of character naturally presupposes a change of language. Stress is laid by Professor Dalman on the facts that the Judaism of the second century of our era possessed the Bible text only in “Assyrian,” i.e., Aramaic handwriting, and that even the Alexandrian or Septuagint translation had been based upon Hebrew texts in this character. ”

“ More important still is the application of Semitic study to elucidate the Gospels. It is idle indeed to rewrite the Gospel narratives in the Aramaic dialect spoken by Christ and the apostles, but the main watchwords of the Gospel theology—phrases like “the Kingdom of God,” “the World to come,” the “Father in Heaven,” “the Son of Man,”—can be more or less surely reconstructed from Jewish writings, and their meaning gauged apart from the special significance which they received in Christian hands. This line of investigation has been specially followed by Professor G. Dalman in his Worte Jesu. ”

“ A series of passages and discourses which had been endangered because from the modern theological point of view which had been made the criterion of the tradition they appeared to be without meaning, are now secured. The stone which the critics rejected has become the corner-stone of the tradition.
If Aramaic scholarship appears in regard to the Son-of-Man question among the opponents of the thorough-going eschatological view, it takes no other position in connexion with the retranslations and in the application of illustrative parallels from the Rabbinic literature. ”

“ This Oriental extravagance, of course, makes for beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely doesn't make for understanding. What the Western World needs is a Bible in which the idioms of the Aramaic of thousands of years ago are translated into the idioms of today. ”

“ That the evangelist knew both Greek and Aramaic, (2) that the Gospel is not a mere translation from the Aramaic or Hebrew. Roughly speaking, the quotations which St. Matthew has in common with the other Synoptists are from the Greek (Septuagint) version of the Old Testament, while those which are peculiar to his {37} Gospel show that the Hebrew has been consulted. Altogether the quotations number 45. Of these there are 11 which are texts quoted by the evangelist himself to illustrate the Messianic work of our Lord, and 9 of the 11 seem to imply a knowledge of Hebrew. They are i. 23; ii. ”

“ Before the time of Christ, people who were not scholars had ceased to understand Hebrew altogether; [13] and in the synagogue, when the Bible was read, a Meturgeman, as he was called, that is, a "dragoman," or qualified translator, had to rise and give the sense of the passage in the vulgar dialect. The Pentateuch was read verse by verse, or in lessons from the Prophets three verses were read together, and then the Meturgeman rose, and did not read, but give orally in Aramaic the sense of the original. ”

“ Zaavan.
2191 זְעֵיר (zeh-ayr') : from an unused root (akin (by permutation) to צָעַר) , meaning to dwindle; small: little.
2192 זְעֵירָה (zeh-ayr') : (Aramaic) corresponding to זְעֵיר: little.
2193 זָעַך (zaw-ak') : a primitive root; to extinguish: be extinct.
2194 זָעַם (zaw-am') : a primitive root; properly, to foam at the mouth, i.e. to be enraged: abhor, abominable, (be) angry, defy, (have) indignation. ”

“ Then let the Hebrew believer, "receiving that inestimable benefit," be ready also to follow his Redeemer's steps in rejection and in shame. Let him also be prepared for casting out by priest and scribe. Let his yearning heart, with whatever anguish, inure itself to the thought that the beloved "city of his solemnities" is not the final and enduring Jerusalem. Let his "thoughts to heaven the steadier rise," as he looks, like Abraham before him, to "God's great town in the unknown land," where sits on high the Mediator of the New Covenant, the "Priest upon His throne." ”

“ Finally, the prophets of the Old Testament exhaust all the wealth of Hebrew poetry in rebuking the sins of the present time, foretelling the mighty judgments of God upon the wicked, lamenting the present sorrows of Zion, and portraying her future glories in connection with the advent of the promised Messiah. The Hebrew harp—whoever sweeps it, and whether its strains be jubilant or sad, didactic or emotional, is ever consecrated to God and the cause of righteousness. ”

“ The Hebrews are men, not angels; men of the old world, not Christians—true! Who could have received this history if it had represented them as Christians, and shown us God giving them commands fit for the Church of to-day? They are called to a higher morality than that of Egypt, for theirs is to be spiritual; higher than that of Chaldea or of Canaan, for Chaldea is shrouded in superstition, Canaan in obscene idolatry. They can do something; and what they can do Jehovah commands them to do. ”