The Aramaic Language

Modern world killing off language of Christ:

The language of Christ is heading for extinction in the last three remote Syrian mountain villages where it is still spoken.

Television and modern communications are taking their toll as the younger generation increasingly relies on Arabic and forgets Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Holy Land 2,000 years ago. In the steep winding streets of Maloula, the picturesque home of a first-century cave shrine to St Tekla and a hillside monastery and convent, many villagers still greet each other in the tongue in which Jesus preached.

CHECK:

BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES:

CAL:
The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon :
(available on-line for research)

Aramaic Bibliography: Part I Addenda

Additions to An Aramaic Bibliography: Part I --- COMPLETE.

Additions to An Aramaic Bibliography: Part I, as published in Newsletter no. 11.

View the Front Matter to An Aramaic BIbliography: Part I in Adobe Acrobat format.

( For best results, the bibliographic files should be viewed on a system with both CAL Semitic and Web Hebrew fonts installed)

Publications of Note

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, by Michael Wise, Martin Abegg, and Edward Cook  published by Harper Collins: The book contains, in translation, most of the legible non-biblical texts from Qumran in a translation intended for a broad audience of both specialists and lay people. The authors provide introductions for each text, with brief commentary, as well as an introduction to the whole volume that seeks to place the Qumran scrolls in their historical context.

Targumic and Cognate Studies: Essays in Honour of Martin McNamara, edited by Kevin Cathcart and Michael Maher (JSOT Supplements 230; Sheffield: Academic Press). It includes 14 essays on the targums and other Aramaic texts, including "Our Translated Tobit" by CAL research associate Edward Cook.

LINKS:

Related Academic Projects:

The West Semitic Research
Univ of Southern California
The Demotic Dictionary Project (Oriental Inst., Univ. of Chicago)
The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Univ-Pennsylvania
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

Academic Resources for Syriac:

Beth Mardutho:
      The Syriac Institute
Syriac Orthodox Resources
Peshitta Institute
 Leiden  Dorek

Online Journals and Newsletters:

Hugoye:
Journal of Syriac
Newsletter for Targumic & Cognate Studies
Suryoyo Online:
Journal of Syrian Orthodox Church, Syriac Studies and Arameans world wide Aramaic

Learning and Translating sites:

Learn Aramaic Online
Learn Assyrian Online 
Peshitta Aramaic-English New Testament (interlinear)
Aramaic Editor
Learn Assyrian-Aramaic
Armaic: languages-on-the-web

Modern Aramaic-Speaking Groups and Forums:

Assyria Online
Niniveh On-Line
Beth Suryoyo Assyrian
Suryoyo World
 

 

 

 




Aramaic Characters

Aramaic is one of the Semitic languages, an important group of languages known almost from the beginning of human history and including also Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Akkadian (ancient Babylonian and Assyrian). It is particularly closely related to Hebrew, and was written in a variety of alphabetic scripts. (What is usually called "Hebrew" script is actually an Aramaic script.)

The Earliest Aramaic

Our first glimpse of Aramaic comes from a small number of ancient royal inscriptions from almost three thousand years ago (900-700 B.C.E.). Dedications to the gods, international treaties, and memorial stelae reveal to us the history of the first small Aramean kingdoms, in the territories of modem Syria and Southeast Turkey, living under the shadow of the rising Assyrian empire.

Aramaic as an Imperial Language

Aramaic was used by the conquering Assyrians as a language of administration communication, and following them by the Babylonian and Persian empires, which ruled from India to Ethiopia, and employed Aramaic as the official language. For this period, then (about 700–320 B.C.E.), Aramaic held a position similar to that occupied by English today. The most important documents of this period are numerous papyri from Egypt and Palestine.

Biblical Aramaic

Aramaic displaced Hebrew for many purposes among the Jews, a fact reflected in the Bible, where portions of Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic. Some of the best known stories in biblical literature, including that of Belshazzar’s feast with the famous "handwriting on the wall" are in Aramaic.

Jewish Aramaic Literature

Aramaic remained a dominant language for Jewish worship, scholarship, and everyday life for centuries in both the land of Israel and in the diaspora, especially in Babylon.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the remains of the library of a Jewish sect from around the turn of the Era, are many compositions in Aramaic. These new texts also provide the best evidence for Palestinian Aramaic of the sort used by Jesus and his disciples.

Since the Jews spoke Aramaic, and knowledge of Hebrew was no longer widespread, the practice arose in the synagogue of providing the reading of the sacred Hebrew scriptures with an Aramaic translation or paraphrase, a "Targum" In the course of time a whole array of targums for the Law and other parts of the Bible were composed. More than translations, they incorporated much of traditional Jewish scriptural interpretation.

In their academies the rabbis and their disciples transmitted, commented, and debated Jewish law; the records of their deliberations constitute the two talmuds: that of the land of Israel and the much larger Babylonian Talmud. Although the talmuds contain much material in Hebrew, the basic language of these vast compilations is Aramaic (in Western and Eastern dialects).

Christian Aramaic Literature

Although Jesus spoke Aramaic, the Gospels are in Greek, and only rarely quote actual Aramaic words. Reconstruction of the Aramaic background of the Gospels remains a fascinating, but inordinately difficult area of modem scholarly research.

Christians in Palestine eventually rendered portions of Christian Scripture into their dialect of Aramaic; these translations and related writings constitute "Christian Palestinian Aramaic".

A much larger body of Christian Aramaic is known as Syriac. Indeed, Syriac writings surpass in quantity all other Aramaic combined. Syriac is originally the literary language of the city of Edessa (now Urfa in SE Turkey). The language became the tongue of the entire eastern wing of the church, from about the third century C.E. down until well past the Muslim conquest.

Syriac writings include numerous Bible translations, the most important being the so-called Peshitta (simple) translation, and countless devotional, dogmatic, exegetical, liturgical, and historical works. Almost all of the Greek philosophical and scientific tradition was eventually translated into Syriac, and it was through this channel that most found their way into the Islamic World and thence, into post-Dark Ages Europe.

Other Aramaic

There are many other branches of Aramaic literature, including the substantial literature of the Mandaeans, a Gnostic religious group, and the Bible translation, liturgy, and doctrinal works of the Samaritans.

Aramaic survives as a spoken language in small communities in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon will not attempt to be a full dictionary for this Modern Aramaic, which is best undertaken as a separate task, but where an ancient word has a modern continuation, the Modern Aramaic use will be recorded.

 

CAL?

CAL is the new dictionary of the Aramaic language, The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, composed by an international team of scholars, with headquarters at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Eeditors are Prof. Stephen A. Kaufman of HUC and Prof. Joseph A. Fitzmyer of Catholic University of America (emeritus), with Prof. Michael Sokoloff of Bar Ilan University as associate editor. This major scholarly reference work covers all dialects and periods of ancient Aramaic, one of the principal languages of antiquity, with a literature of central importance for history and civilization, and especially for the Jewish and Christian religions.

Why a New Lexicon?

Many dictionaries of some part of Aramaic exist, but individually and as a whole they are inadequate in important ways. Lexical treatment of Aramaic has been fragmented. Existing dictionaries treat one dialect, or one body of literature, but not the whole language. It is as though we had a dictionary of Shakespeare, and one of Hemingway, without having a dictionary of English! An additional hurdle in the path of users is that Aramaic dictionaries are written in an imposing variety of living and dead languages: not only English but also German, French, Russian, and Latin! Many of the existing dictionaries do not come up to modem standards of accuracy, and practically all are seriously incomplete and out-of-date. Practically every area of Aramaic studies has been enriched by recent discoveries: new inscriptions, new papyri, new scrolls, and new fragments from the Cairo Genizah, a synagogue store-room where a trove of manuscripts was discovered in the 19th century. These recently discovered materials demand inclusion in a lexicon.

A Comprehensive Lexicon

The new lexicon is to be "comprehensive" in the following ways: 1) it will take in all of ancient Aramaic, not just selected portions; 2) it will be based on a new and thorough compilation of all Aramaic literature, not just on existing dictionaries; 3) it will take account of all modem scholarly discussion of the Aramaic language.

Publication

(View current list of publications)

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon is to he published in book form, as a multi-volume set. In addition, the work of the project will lead to the compilation of textual, lexical, and bibliographic data bases which can be distributed and consulted through computers and related technology. Leading up to the lexicon volumes there have been and will continue to be a series of preparatory monographs, consisting of dialect dictionaries, manuals of procedure for the project, editions of texts with concordances, bibliographies, and the like. Our primary publisher is the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Project Support

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon has received support in the form of outright grants and federal matching funds (requiring that the project raise equivalent funds from other sources) from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The National Endowment is a federal agency that funds the study of such fields as history, philosophy, literature, and languages. The project is also supported in part by private contributions and additional private and foundation support is being sought. 

Projects and news:

CPA Project

Prof. Michael Sokoloff and Dr. Christa Müller-Kessler, were awarded a grant: by, the German Israeli:Foundation for Scientific Research and Development for a project entitled "A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic Texts" :in the sum of 170,000DM. The project was to last from Jan, 1994 through 1996,

The purpose of the project was to prepare for publication critical text editions of the Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) palimpsest manuscripts. CPA was spoken, written, and employed as a liturgical language by a group of Christians calling themselves Melkites who lived in the Judean Desert, the vicinity of Jerusalem, Amman, and the Sinai Peninsula between the 3rd-13th cents. C.E.

It is nearly ninety years since the last major text editions were published.: During the last four decades much progress has taken place in research on Western Aramaic-which also includes Samaritan and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic-in the form of new critical editions of texts, grammars, and dictionaries. A desideratum now is the preparation of reliable. And up-to-date editions of the CPA texts.

Each volume produced contains: 1. The CPA text; 2. a translation of the non-biblical texts; 3. a philological commentary; 4. a glossary; 5. a concordance for the biblical volumes; 6. photographs where necessary and available.

The following volumes are  in the series (All page numbers are approximate):

1. The Remains of the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Old Testament Version from the Early Period (110 pages of text, 30 pages of commentary, 20 pages of glossary, 20 pages of concordance, 20 Plates).

2. The Christian Palestinian Aramaic New Testament Version from the Early Period. Part I: The Gospels (200 pages of text, 30 pages of commentary, 30 pages of concordance, 10 plates); Part II: The Epistles (250 pages of text, 30 pages glossary, 30 pages of concordance, 20 plates).

3. The Forty Martyrs of the Syrian Desert, Eulogios the Stone Cutter and Anastasia (85 pages of text, 85 pages of translation, 20 pages of commentary, 30 pages of glossary).

4. A Collection of the Lives of Saints, Homilies and Other Religious Texts (140 pages of text, 140 pages of translation, 40 pages of commentary, 20 pages glossary).

5. Cyril of Jerusalem in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Version (65 pages of text, 65 pages of translation, 30 pages of commentary, 20 pages of glossary). 

Peshitta Symposium

The Peshitta Institute held a Peshitta Symposium  from August 19-21, 1993. The theme of the symposium was "The Peshitta as a Translation" presenters included Gideon Goldenberg, Y. Maori, Konrad Jenner, Donald Walters, P. G. Borbone, Jerome A. Lund, Jan Joosten, Piet Dirksen, F. Sepmeijer, J. C. De Moor, and A. van der Kooij.

 Neofiti KWIC To Appear

The second major CAL publication, A Key Word in Context Concordance to Targum Neofiti I, by Stephen A. Kaufman and Michael Sokoloff, was published (1508 pp.; $125). Purchasers are entitled to receive an electronic copy of the complete text of Targum Neofiti prepared for this concordance, including marginalia. Also available to purchasers, but for an additional charge to help support the substantial programming effort involved, will be a lexically parsed form of the data and complete dictionary. Please order this book from the Johns Hopkins University Press or your favorite bookstore.