Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

The Dangers of Aramaic

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 and mine, I was spared having to memorize Chaucer. But I have read it, and I am profoundly thankful that modern English editions of the work are available. I would challenge anyone who has not studied Middle English to try and make modern sense out of Chaucer's work in the original. Yet those tales were written down only about six hundred years ago. It is a profound education in the history and development of language to sit with the Middle English Chaucer and muddle along through it, not even half understanding what he wrote.

Many of those who connect the Aramaic of the Bible, and the Syriac of the Peshitta, to the Aramaic spoken today fail to recognize that the same kinds of changes that took place in English between the time of Chaucer and today also took place between Bible times and today in the Syriac or Aramaic language. There are differences between English and Syriac, certainly. English has become an international language in a way that Aramaic has not been since about the fourth century BC. Further, those limited areas in which Syriac is spoken today is an isolated, insulated, and conservative culture in a way that British/American culture has never been. However, no language, and no culture remains absolutely static over the course of two millennia. The Syriac language spoken today is perhaps more closely related to biblical Aramaic and Syriac than modern English is to Middle English, but not much. It is best to describe modern Syriac as J. Fitzmyer does, "a remnant of Aramaic or Syriac, heavily influenced, however, by other modern local languages such as Arabic, Kurdish, or Turkish." Another way to put it is that the modern speaker of Syriac is just as apt to misunderstand a passage of the Peshitta as he is to understand it. He would have no special insight, and in fact faces a more serious danger of misunderstanding than a modern who does not speak modern Syriac.

Consider this illustration taken from Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew has a complex verb system that is not time-oriented, but rather deals with aspect. There are five "tenses" in Biblical Hebrew—perfect, imperfect, imperative, infinitive, and participle. The last three function very much like the same thing in English. The perfect and imperfect, however, are entirely different. The perfect deals with an event considered as a whole, or from outside. The imperfect deals with an event as unfinished, in progress, or from the inside. Thus, a verb in the perfect may be used to speak about something yet future but considered as a whole. The imperfect may be used to speak about something in the past, but from the perspective of it having been in progress. In Modern Hebrew, that has utterly changed. Modern Hebrew has changed from an aspect-based verb system to a time-based system. Thus it uses the perfect for past tense, the imperfect for future tense, and the participle for present tense. A speaker of Modern Hebrew who attempts to read the Hebrew Bible unaware of the changes in the verb system will regularly misinterpret verbal elements of the text. A modern speaker of Syriac who is unaware of the changes that has taken place in the language since the Peshitta was written will likewise misinterpret, or completely misunderstand many things in the Peshitta. So knowing modern Syriac is not necessarily a help, and may be a detriment to understanding Aramaic and Syriac and their importance for Bible study.

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