Language Studies

Matthew 5:22 says, "But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the counsel; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire." There are two items in this verse that Lamsa identifies as idioms. The first has been…

In the introduction to the little book Idioms in the Bible Explained, George Lamsa makes a statement that needs badly to be corrected. After indicating that he used the KJV as the source for the idioms quoted, he says he did so for two reasons. First, at the time the KJV was the English version most widely used.…

Matt 4:11 says, "Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him." According to Lamsa, the clause "angels were ministering to him" is an idiom for Jesus being comforted by God’s thoughts. Unfortunately, Lamsa offers no evidence that this is the case. The word for angel is the standard Semitic term…

In Matt 3:7, John calls those Pharisees and Sadducees who have come out to him "brood of vipers." The Syriac word for "viper" is simply a transliteration of the Greek echidna, and is not the Hebrew/Aramaic nachash that is used in the Old Testament. Lamsa takes this phrase as an idiom meaning "sly, deceptive."…

As we begin to maneuver through this material, we need to make another distinction: the difference between an idiom and figurative language. An idiom is "an expression in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself either grammatically or in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meaning of its…

English is difficult to learn as a second language in part because it is full of idiomatic expressions. These expressions are difficult to understand for a variety of reasons. Some idioms are difficult to understand because words are used in unexpected ways. For example, "all of the above" could easily provoke the question,…

When my older sisters were in high school, one of the things that they had to do in one of their English classes was to memorize the opening section of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. Because of the "improvements" in high school instruction that took place between their time in high school…

I did not see the movie The Passion of the Christ. But my understanding is that the dialogue was done entirely in Aramaic, with subtitles. This arrangement apparently sprang from both Gibson's desire for realism or authenticity, and from his conviction that Aramaic was the daily spoken language of Palestine in the…

We have seen in the last few weeks that the extant Aramaic epistles have a number of fairly consistent features. These features remain even though the epistles are of varying types. They also come from a fairly broad area (from the edge of the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia and extending down to Egypt). They also come from…

In these epistles there is often a secondary greeting. This greeting (or greetings) usually ask the addressee to pas on the greetings of the writer to others. This secondary greeting does not always immediately follow the initial greeting, but is sometimes found further along in the letter. To this might be compared Paul's…

The second part of the typical epistle, closely connected to the praescriptio, is the initial greeting. This normally involves some use of the word shalom (peace) and/or some form of the word barak (bless or blessing). To this may be compared the initial greetings in Paul’ epistles. These are as follows:…

Letters have a formal order, though in this day of e-mail, the elements of this order seem to be getting fewer and fewer. Further, the formality of writing seems to have disappeared with the widespread use of e-mail. However, the surviving Aramaic epistles tend to follow a set formal order containing the same elements,…

The epistles of the New Testament were, so far as anyone can tell at this point, composed in Greek. Further, discussion of these writings as "epistles" seems to have focused on their similarities with contemporary Greek epistles as to the general form and order of the writings. This being said, it might be of some help…

As our brief investigation has shown, the use of the phrase "son of man" in the gospels seems unique in the Hebrew/Aramaic literature not only in the pre-Christian era, but also in the centuries after Christ. What then is to be made of the phrase and its significance? First, it is a phrase that came consistently from the…