Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

Aramaic in Mark - Part 4

The last Aramaic utterance of Jesus recorded by Mark is in 15:34, "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’" There are a number of interesting elements to this cry of Jesus. For one thing, the quotation in Mark does not match exactly the citation as it appears in Matthew 27:46. The Matthew citation begins, "Eli, Eli." There is no difference in meaning between the two, but it does reflect the difficulty of transliterating from one language into another. No two languages are precisely alike in the sounds they use, even if they are closely related. Hebrew and Aramaic, for example, have two "h" sounds, one of which is equivalent to the English "h" (he) The other "h," (chet) however, has no precise equivalent in English, but is usually represented by a "ch" and is roughly equivalent to the "ch" at the end of Bach or loch. However, when written that way (for example, the name Chedorlaomer in Genesis 14) many English readers tend to read it as if it were like the "ch" in "church" and thus really mispronounce the name. For those who are interested, most editions of the KJV have diacritical marks added for help in pronouncing the Hebrew names properly. Greek, however, has no "h" sound at all. As a result, Greek transliterations of Hebrew and Aramaic lose the "h" entirely, as has happened with both Matthew and Mark.

Interestingly, Matthew’s transliteration "Eli, Eli" transliterates the Hebrew text in Psalm 22:1, rather than the Aramaic, though the rest of his transliteration follows the Aramaic, as does Mark’s. Mark’s transliteration "Eloi, Eloi" while probably giving the Aramaic, is not as accurate as it could be. Mark’s transliteration is epsilon, lambda, omega, iota. But the Aramaic is "elahi," which would better be represented in Greek either by epsilon, lambda, omicron, iota, or by epsilon, lambda, alpha, iota. This difference may reflect not so much an attempt to be strictly accurate, but rather to attempt to indicate how the word was pronounced by Aramaic speakers of the first century. It may well be that under the influence of the Greek that was the trade language of the day, the "h" sound in Aramaic in the middle of words, particularly common words, may have elided, that is, dropped. A similar thing happens in Cockney English, where many initial "h" sounds are dropped. Another interesting related point is that the English pronounce the word "herb" retaining the initial "h," while Americans tend to pronounce it "erb."

The part of the quote that makes it most clear that Jesus makes this cry in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew is the last word "sabachthani." This word occurs in Biblical Aramaic in Daniel 4: 12,20, 25. The Hebrew of Psalm 22:1 is "‘azabtani." The Hebrew "‘azab" and the Aramaic "shabach" are very close synonyms. The reader should note that while Hebrew and Aramaic are closely related, the word for one thing in Aramaic may or may not be etymologically related to the word for the same thing in Hebrew. Note that the Greek, unlike English, is able to transliterate the Aramaic chet with the letter chi, but is not able to represent the "sh" sound of the Aramaic shin, so the transliteration simply goes with the sigma.

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