Aramaic, hebrew, greek, the old testament and the new

The Old Testament is Hebrew. Only possibly a few chapters in the prophecies of Ezra and Daniel and one verse in Jeremiah were written in a language called Aramaic. Ancient Hebrew is a Semitic language that dates back past 1500 B.C. Hebrew is one of a group of languages known as the Semitic languages which were spoken throughout that part of the world, then called Mesopotamia, located today mainly in Iraq.

In my study of various languages, and 5 years working on Hebrew (Ancient and Modern) I find good support for the tower of Babel dispersion, confusion of the basic (Hebrew) language... throughout the world and in the languages of the world.

Are you thinking of Coptic? http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/Ling450ch/reports/afro-asiatic.html



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"The debate for a Greek primacy to the New Testament vs. an Aramaic primacy of the New Testament has been the subject of debate for a very long time. While the majority of Western Christian churches hold to a Greek primacy for the New Testament, the majority of Eastern Christian churches hold to an Aramaic primacy for the New Testament."


Good resources with more info:
http://www.baruch-hashem.com/index....e-new-testament-originally-written-in-aramaic

http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/nt_manuscripts.html

"Signed and dated 463-4 by its scribe, a bishop called John, this important early copy of the first five books of the Bible is in Syriac, a dialect of Eastern Aramaic (Aramaic being the language spoken by Jesus). It comes from an area now in Syria, Iraq and Turkey." http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/syriacbib.html

Daniel Newhouse said:

You can easily sea the point of view switching back and forth in the old testament between the Aramaic and Hebrew narratives.

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Only if you know those languages.

Daniel Newhouse said:

Aramaic, though, is that the ancient language of Egypt?

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It is the language of Aram. That people-group migrated from Ur to what is now Syria.

Daniel Newhouse said:

If semitic means derived from semitism, i.e.-Hebrew

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No, it does not mean that.

Daniel Newhouse said:

does the existence of Aramaic mean there were 2 cultures that survived the Flood?

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Huh?

I think Aramaic (Chaldean) was only used in parts of Daniel, and a snippet here or there in Ezra and Nehemiah. Semitic is a family of languages which includes both Hebrew and Arabic. Aram is an old name for Syria whose language is/was also Semitic in origin. Semitic is the linguistic term for the languages that originated along the lineage of Shem, Abraham's great+++grandfather one of the sons of Noah.

Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, and Assyrian are all part of the Semitic language family. Just like how French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian are all Romance languages.

I think it was during the Babylonian and Assyrian eras when the Israelites began adopting Aramaic as a spoken language. By the time of Christ everyone spoke Aramaic, but still used Hebrew as a written. Most likely so they could read the Torah. Hebrew continued to be used as a written language among scattered Jewish communities until the modern era when Hebrew as a spoken language was revived (we call it Modern Hebrew now) and the State of Israel was established. When the Jews in Arab lands were kicked out in 1948, they learned Modern Hebrew in Israel.

Daniel Newhouse said:

Aramaic, though, is that the ancient language of Egypt? But the wikipedia says that it is semitic. As far as I know, semitic languages are based on Akkadian.

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That would be Coptic. The Coptic Orthodox Church still uses the Coptic language in their Liturgy, but only a few hundred people still speak it as a first language, if that. Most Copts speak Arabic in Egypt now, or the language of whatever country they live in.

Daniel Newhouse said:

My bible, Revised American, says that the Old Testament is Aramaic and Hebrew. The new testament is koine Greek. You can easily sea the point of view switching back and forth in the old testament between the Aramaic and Hebrew narratives.

This is why Sunday school could teach so many serious things.

Is Hebrew supposed to be the original language of the prophet Abraham? That would mean it is from Ur, and the Jews are possibly preserving ancient Sumerian? Ur is a Sumerian city. It is rather close to Basra and the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates river....

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I'm hardly a scholar of Hebrew or Semitic languages, so I'm probably writing out of turn here.

The consensus among the experts seems to be that Abraham probably spoke Akkadian, which was the language of his home region in Ur.

From Wikipedia ... Akkadian language - Wikipedia

Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in Ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC.

It is the earliest attested Semitic language. It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate). Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund.

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I don't know when and where the Israelites started using Hebrew as we're familiar with it. The chances are that it derived from proto-Canaanite languages which were also Semitic in origin. Even then it would have gone through stages of development just as English has. We'd have trouble understanding William Shakespeare if he were being interviewed on live television today.

I think that discussion of Semitic languages would go way over the head of most Sunday School students. Maybe a Bible Study group for adults, but you'd need to keep it simple or they'd drift off.

The Hebrew in Bibles today has vowel markers, which the OT Jews didn't have. They just knew what the vowels were from reading or hearing them read in the synagogues. Every language has vowels - it's impossible not to use them. But they weren't written down in ancient Hebrew.

It was the Masoretes, a group of Jewish scholars and scribes who developed the vowel markers sometime in the 5th to 10th century to make it easier to learn the Hebrew language, which was in danger of being lost as so many Jews no longer knew the language, and therefore did not know when to pronounce the unmarked vowels even if they had the rare privilege of having access to a copy of the Torah or Jewish Scriptures.

Because they regarded Scriptural Hebrew as holy, they didn't want to put extra letters representing vowels between the existing consonants, and thus change the text. So they developed a system of markers which are usually under, sometimes over, beside or inside the existing letters.

The first modern Hebrew dictionary was compiled by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and first published in 1908.