Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

The Characteristics of Biblical Aramaic

Biblical Aramaic, the Aramaic that is found in the Old Testament, falls under the general category of Official Aramaic. This was the form of Aramaic that is found in the in the written material that originated between roughly 700 and 200 BC. It is represented by texts found in Egypt (both Upper and Lower), Arabia, Palestine, Assyria, Babylonia, and Syria, as well as other scattered places throughout the Near East. It seems to have served as the language of official correspondence for the empires that ruled the eastern end of the Mediterranean world in that time frame.

Official Aramaic was written in what is now referred to as the Hebrew or square script. Most of the characters are quite similar in appearance to that found in modern printed Hebrew Bibles. As with Hebrew, the writing moves from right to left, and was written without a standard system of vowels, though the letters yod, he, waw, and aleph occasionally, though not regularly, served to indicate vowels. At least in the Egyptian and Qumran material, the words are consistently separated by a space. This is a significant difference from Biblical Greek texts. The earliest Biblical Greek materials are written in uncial (capital) letters that run continuously across the page. It is this “unspaced” writing that has caused some of the differences in readings in the New Testament text, since later copyists occasional made mistakes in separating words, when the practice of inserting spaces between words in Greek became the standard practice. The doubling of Aramaic consonants was indicated by placing a dot in the letter. This is a practice that developed separately from the development of the complete system of vowel indicators (called “pointing”) that characterizes the modern Aramaic (and Hebrew) printed Biblical text.

The vocabulary of Biblical Aramaic has been greatly influenced by the fact that it is a Semitic language that arose and developed in the midst of a number of other Semitic languages. These include Akkadian (the language of Babylon and Assyria), Ugaritic (the language of Ras Shamra (along the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea), and Hebrew. There is also influence from Greek, since Greek was beginning to be widely used along the eastern rim of the Mediterranean during the later period of Official Aramaic.

From Hebrew, Aramaic received the words for prophet, offering, angel, and the tribes of Israel, among others. Some of these have been completely Aramaized, while others retain their primarily Hebrew characteristics. From Akkadian comes such words as temple and chair, as well as many of the words concerning political and financial administration. Persian also shows its influence in administrative terms, as well as cultural terms such as the words for necklace and hat. The loan words from appear primarily in cultural terms, such as the various sorts of musical instruments recorded in Daniel 3. The fact that in the relatively small collection of Biblical texts in Aramaic (about 200 verses) so many loan words are found attests to the international character of the language in the middle to latter part of the first millennium BC.

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