Posted on 06/03/2008 7:55:15 AM PDT by NYer
A question arises time and again from prilgrims visiting the Holy Land: What was the language that Jesus spoke? They ask: What was the language of Palestine in the times of Jesus? What languages did Jesus speak? Were there any indications found in the Gospels?
Palestine, given that it was always a crossroads for entire peoples in their spontaneous, and often times forced, migrations, was by necessity a multi-lingual land. It was a place where they spoke several languages at the same time. That is, in the times of Jesus, there were no less than two local languages spoken and understood by the majority of the people: Hebrew and Aramaic. Two “international” languages were also used: Greek and Latin. These however were spoken by a small group of persons found in State Administration and Education.
The Hebrew language, the same language used in writing the Books of the Old Testament, came into common usage in the Liturgy of the Shabbat (Sabbath) of the Synagogue, even though there were few who understood it clearly.
Besides Hebrew, there was another language -- Aramaic -- which had already been used along side for some centuries. This language was the “familiar” language which the people spoke in most of the villages and towns of Palestine, particularly in the North (Nazareth, Capharnaum, etc.) Where Jesus was educated, grew up, and spent the major portion of His life. It was also understood and spoken outside the confines of this region.
Besides the “local” languages, there were two other “international” languages. These two languages were spoken in the towns where there were persons of learning, and administrators of the State, as numerous inscriptions of the times have testified and come down to us. While in the villages such as Nazareth and Capharnaum, the dominant language, if not the only one, was Aramaic.
One incident recorded in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 4: 16-30) helps us understand tha the Hebrew language was familiar to Jesus. In this passage, it says that Jesus read the Scroll of the Law (from the Prophet Isaiah) in the Synagogue at Nazareth. Certainly this Reading was done in Hebrew. The few words that Jesus added by way of comment were most probably spoken in Aramaic. A little like our Church, before the liturgy was reformed, when the Readings were proclaimed in Latin but the Homily was given in the native language of the people.
This, therefore, was the atmosphere in which Jesus grew up. It was a multi-lingual environment in which Hebew and Aramaic had to at least have the advantage of usage in the ordinary conversations of daily life.
The Palestinian Substructure
Besides these logical deductions, derived from Gospel texts and common sense, there are other elements -- quite “probable” in our view -- that allow us to reconstruct the Mid-Eastern Cultural Foundation, and thus. . . some Aramaic words and phrases spoken by Jesus.
The New Testament, written in Greek, allows us a glimpse, here and there, among the transcribed and translated words, of genuine Palestinian “root” words. This is the case with a number of proper names, whether of persons or places, that easily go back to Aramaic origins. For example: Bariona, Barabba. Names of persons, clearly of Aramaic origin, composed of the word bar which means son, with the addition of the name of the father. Or, Capharnaum translated, although with some difficulty, from the form Kafar Nahum, the Village of Nahum, or also the name Aceldama, as found in the Book of Acts 1:19, which unites two words Haquel dema, that is “Camp of Blood.”
There are also names of women: Marta (Luke 10:38), and Tabita (Acts 9:36) which mean respectively: Madame (or Woman), and Gazelle. (These were well-known and frequently used names in the times of Jesus, taken from Aramaic.) The name of Peter -- Cefa -- corresponds to the Aramaic form of Kefa which means Rock. The name Golgata (Matt. 27:33), and Gabbata (John 19:13) recalling the accounts of the Passion, are derived from two words with the sense of “(place of) the skull” and “the elevated place.”
The Words certainly spoken by Jesus
Some words that the Evangelists put into the mouth of Jesus turn out to be very interesting. For example: Effeta or Effata ( the Command form of the word patah with the meaning of to to open) is faithfully written down by the Evangelists. Or, Talita Qum which means: Arise little child! Also Abba (Mark 14:36 and Gal. 4:6) which means Papa/Father, and is still used in present-day Israel. Recall the Aramaic phrase so well recorded by the Evangelists, and spoken by Jesus as He was dying on the Cross: Eloi Eloi lema sabactani. These Words, found in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, are interpreted for us as a Prayer of Jesus. They were in fact the beginning of Psalm 22, spoken by Jesus in Aramaic, and faithfully written down by the Evangelists in Greek. It is possible that the Evangelists wished to preserve and hand down through their writings some words certainly spoken by Jesus, words which the Early Christians (since they spoke Aramaic) faithfully remembered.
Scarcely had the words been written down when there were some that were justly counted among the words “certainly” spoken by Jesus. Linguistic analysis and comparisons of contemporary Aramaic dialects with that of Jesus confirm this.
Jesus spoke Aramaic in Galilee
In the light of this data, the hypothesis -- often aired in the last two centuries -- that Jesus spoke Greek or Latin is impossible to accept. Or better yet, anyone who would wish to hold such an hypothesis must prove it. Specialists of the Aramaic language have analyzed closely this topic, and had come to distinguish various Aramaic dialects in the contemporary Palestine of Jesus as testified to by inscriptions thus discovered. B Based on this data, they are able to distinguish seven dialects that were shared by seven different localities in this small region: 1. Aramaic of Judea. 2. Aramaic of Southern Judea. 3. Aramaic of Samaria. 4. Aramaic of Galilee. 5. Aramaic from beyond Jordan. 6. Aramaic from Damascus. Aramaic spoken in the Orontes River Basin of Syria.
It is a question about a relatively restricted region that would now embrace the actual area of the present State of Israel, and parts of the bordering countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Also if this distinction seems a bit artificial, nevertheless it becomes quite clear that there were local differences in the Aramaic language. These changes did not affect the mutual comprehension of the inhabitants of the different localities (realizing that the distance between these various localities was small and contact was frequent).
Jesus certainly spoke the Aramaic dialect of Galilee, but His words were “Jerusalem-ized”, so to speak, for the Early Church, and transmitted to us in the dialect of Jerusalem. It is well recorded that the difference between the Jerusalem and Galilee dialects was small and, all things considered, quite negligible.
A theme that impassions students has been the reconstruction of the “Our Father.” It is thought that Jesus had taught this prayer in his own language, and therefore in Aramaic. Nonetheless, in the Gospels, it is the Greek version that remained for Christians of Gentile origin as well as the Primitive Church of Jerusalem. Though the Church of Jerusalem, which spoke Aramaic, continued to recite it in the original language without feeling any necessity to put it down in writing.
These brief considerations show us that Jesus, Son of His times and His earth, did not disdain to immerse Himself in the language and culture in which He lived.
LOL
That’s kinda cute, actually.
They knew...
Who? Indiana Iones?
I have that book as well as the sequel
Acts 26:14 And when we all had fallen to the ground, I heard a voice speaking to me and saying in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’
They all spoke Hebrew!
Luke 23:38 And an inscription also was written over Him in letters of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
John 5:2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches.
John 19:17 And He, bearing His cross, went out to a place called the Place of a Skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha,
Acts 21:40 So when he had given him permission, Paul stood on the stairs and motioned with his hand to the people. And when there was a great silence, he spoke to them in the Hebrew language, saying,
Acts 22:2 And when they heard that he spoke to them in the Hebrew language, they kept all the more silent.Then he said:
BTW, there’s no such thing as a Greek, Latin or Aramaic Torah Scroll!
Wouldn’t the fact that these passage explicitly name Hebrew imply that He usually spoke a different language?
You may have missed the point of this article. It is very probable that our Lord understood and spoke Greek and even Latin; we know he could read Hebrew. What the author is saying is that in everyday parlance, Jesus, His Mother, adoptive father and His disciples all spoke Aramaic.
We see this even today. Arabic has been adopted as the 'official' language of many countries in the Middle East, including Lebanon, where it is taught in the schools. However, outside the school and in the marketplace, the common language spoken is Lebanese - not Arabic. And even amongst the nations that have adopted Arabic as their official language, the form spoken is so different that an Egyptian cannot understand the Arabic spoken by an Iraqi.
BTTT
Just like many of us cannot understand English as spoken in Texas :-)
If Jesus had spoken Aramaic as his everyday language then the inscription on the cross would have been in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. However his everyday language was not Aramaic but Hebrew, therefore the inscription on the cross was in Hebrew, Latin and Greek.
This implies either that Jesus wrote the inscription on his cross, or that those who wrote it used his language for his convenience. I do not find either of these conclusions very likely.
The Romans who made the sign were that deferential to their subjects, eh?
LOL
You forgot the third conclusion.
Our western system of law descends from that of the Romans and part of that western system requires that a person charged with a crime should know just exactly what he is being accused of in a language that he can understand.
It was Roman custom for one charged with a crime to have their crime read to them in their own language, and if sentenced to death by cricifixion, then the crime they were convicted of was inscribed on the cross in their own language. Unless you are going to say that Jesus spoke to the people in Latin and Greek, then by virtue of the inscription on the cross, the Romans were acknowledging that the language he spoke was Hebrew -- not Aramaic.
The second language, if different from the first, was to be the language of the local people so that they also would know why that person was sentenced to death. That language in both cases here was Hebrew -- not Aramaic.
The Greek language was also used as it was the more universal language of the empire for foreigners and visitors to understand. And the Latin was for the Roman soldiers and government officials to understand.
The absence of Aramaic on the inscription speaks volumes. Jesus spoke Hebrew and the Jews with whom he spoke understood it. The inscription on the cross proves it.
It isn't often that I hear something new about Roman Culture here, sounds interesting. I am also wondering if it is possible that Aramaic was strictly a spoken language at that time and place (I know, this is very unlikely)?
Exactly so.
The inscription on the cross was presumably written in a language the people reading it would be able to read. This establishes that Hebrew literacy was widespread, not that Hebrew was the daily language of Judaea. In fact, Jesus’ “eli, eli, lama sabachthani!” and numerous other Aramaicisms encoded into the Greek of the New Testament suggests strongly that the normal language of day-to-day conversation was Aramaic.
Eli, Hebrews eli, “my God”, ( Matthew 27:46), an exclamation used by Christ on the cross.
Mark (15:34), as usual, gives the original Aramaic form of the word, Eloi.
Sorry, my mistake.
But the point remains.
Hebrew literacy was not widespread outside of the Jewish community, and the further one travelled from Jeruslaem the less Hebrew the Jewish community spoke and understood. But around Jerusalem and Judea Hebrew was the language of choice for the nationalistic Jewish community to whom Jesus was sent.
In fact, Jesus’ “eli, eli, lama sabachthani!” and numerous other Aramaicisms encoded into the Greek of the New Testament suggests strongly that the normal language of day-to-day conversation was Aramaic.
These few Aramaicisms were the exceptions not the rule. The fact that those few Aramaicisms were left untranslated in the Greek Gospels, ie transferred verbatim, is indicative that the language the Jews spoke everyday was not Aramaic. Otherwise why translate all the rest that Jesus and the people said to each other into the Greek but leave these few Aramaicisms untranslated???
The fact is that just because Jesus mixed some Aramaic into his Hebrew does not mean that He was now speaking Aramaic, anymore than those of us do today when we mix words from other languages into our everyday English. We are still speaking English.
Mark 5:41 Talita, kumi! “Little girl, get up!” in Aramaic. It is sometimes asked whether Yeshua spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. Though Aramaic and Greek were the international languages in use in the Middle East in the first century, Hebrew was a common household language among Jews at that time and continued to be spoken until the third century c.e. After that time it was used for prayer but rarely for daily communication. In the nineteenth century it was revived for secular literary purposes and consciously developed as a modern language by Eli‛ezer Ben-Yehuda and others after 1879. Most people in Yeshua’s day probably spoke all three languages in some degree. In the New Testament the Greek word “Ebraios” and its cognates can refer to either Aramaic or Hebrew.On this subject Professor David Flusser, an Orthodox Jewish scholar in Jerusalem, writes: “The spoken languages among the Jews of that period were Hebrew, Aramaic, and to an extent Greek. Until recently, it was believed by numerous scholars that the language spoken by Jesus’ disciples was Aramaic. It is possible that Jesus did, from time to time, make use of the Aramaic language. But during that period Hebrew was both the daily language and the language of study. The Gospel of Mark contains a few Aramaic words, and this was what misled scholars. Today, after the discovery of the Hebrew Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) [a book of the Apocrypha], of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and of the Bar Kokhba Letters, and in the light of more profound studies of the language of the Jewish Sages, it is accepted that most people were fluent in Hebrew. The Pentateuch was translated into Aramaic for the benefit of the lower strata of the population. The parables in the Rabbinic literature, on the other hand, were delivered in Hebrew in all periods. There is thus no ground for assuming that Jesus did not speak Hebrew; and when we are told (Acts 21:40) that Paul spoke Hebrew, we should take this piece of information at face value.” (Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, POB 7103, Tel Aviv 61070: MOD Books, 1989) See also Shmuel Safrai, “Spoken Languages in the Time of Jesus,” in Jerusalem Perspective 4:1 (January/February 1991), pp. 3–8, 13; and William Chomsky, Hebrew: The Eternal Language (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957; 4th printing 1969), chapter 11, entitled “Did Hebrew Ever Die?” (his answer is: No).
Stern, D. H. (1996, c1992). Jewish New Testament Commentary : A companion volume to the Jewish New Testament (electronic ed.) (Mk 5:41). Clarksville: Jewish New Testament Publications.
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