Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

Resources available for the study of the Aramaic - Part 4

Carmignac’s fourth category of Semitism’s in the New Testament he calls "Semitisms of Vocabulary." What he means by this identification is as follows: Each language uses words in a way unique to itself, and in constructions unique to itself. When a speaker of one language writes in another, he tends to use the words in the second language in the same way he would use them in his native language. The example he offers is the Hebrew (and Aramaic) use of the word ben, which means "son." English tends to use the word son in a restrictive sense, simply referring to the immediate male descendant of a particular couple. Hebrew and Aramaic, however, while sometimes using ben in that restricted sense, also uses it in a number of broader ways. It can mean not only immediate descendant (Isaac was the son of Abraham), but a more or less distant descendant ("sons of the fourth generation" 2Kgs 10:30). It can also mean generically "young men" (Proverbs 7:7). It can also mean persons of a particular class ("sons of the prophets" 1Kgs 20:35). It is in this latter sense that the New Testament perhaps most commonly uses uios (Gk: son), as it occurs in such constructions as "sons of the kingdom" (Matthew 8:12); "son of peace" (Luke 16:8); and "son of the resurrection" (Luke 20:36). These constructions are definitely Semitic. However, they are so characteristic of the Jewish Greek texts of the first century that their existence cannot be used to argue that the material was originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic. This, even Carmignac himself admits (pp. 23-24).

The fifth category of Semitisms identified by Carmignac are "Semitisms of Syntax." The example that Carmignac uses here is a particular construction for the genitive case. Hebrew and Aramaic do not have cases as such (that is, the form of the word does not change to indicate case as it does in Greek). But there is a construction known as the construct chain that the Semitic languages use to indicate the genitive case. In this construction, the second noun in the chain may be definite, but the first never is. Hence, "the house of the king" in Hebrew, and usually in Aramaic, is with wooden literalness "a house of the king." The definite article is understood to apply to both nouns, since they are part of the same syntactic structure. The same phenomenon appears a number of times in the New Testament. Two nouns in a genitive relationship will have the definite article with the second noun but not with the first. Now this may reflect only the characteristic uses of a native Semitic speaker. But they might also, as Carmignac says, "indicate a translator who was too slavish in his task" (p. 24). In Carmignac’s view, the frequency of these sorts of constructions in the New Testament tends to argue the latter view, rather than the former. My own view is that it tends to indicate the opposite, that a translator, whose Greek was otherwise good, would have translated these constructions into the normal Greek usage, rather than creating a solecism (a grammatical anomaly) in his Greek text.

We will continue our investigation next week.

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