Maronite Christians Seek To Revive Aramaic Language

On a hot August day in the Galilee, a group of schoolchildren in the Arab Christian village of Jish counted diligently, from one to 10, after their instructor. But the words, though similar to Arabic and Hebrew, were neither.

”Chada, tarteyn, telat, arba, khamesh,” they recited, ”shet, shva, tamney, teysha, asar.”

At this unique summer camp, some 85 children were being immersed in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke and in which the Gemara — one of the Talmud’s two major books — was written. Once the Middle East’s lingua franca, Aramaic is an almost vanished language today. But the camp organizers and the families of these children hope to resurrect it. Moreover, they aim to carve out a new national identity based on that resurrection.

It’s a campaign that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, would readily understand and, perhaps, applaud. But in today’s Israel, it’s a campaign fraught with controversy.

Aram, the Maronite Christian group that organized the camp, is spending long hours huddling with a team of lawyers, preparing papers to submit to Israel’s Supreme Court later in October. They are seeking formal recognition of their nationality as “Aramaic,” rather than Arab, by the State of Israel.

Other communities registered in Israel as national groups, such as Arabs, Druze and Jews, receive important legal status in Israel and, with this, certain kinds of communal recognition, such as their own respective education systems within the Ministry of Education. The leaders of Aram say they are not seeking anything like that for now. The recognition would be largely symbolic. But the group has greater long-term ambitions that include uniting Maronite Christian communities throughout the region as a cohesive ethnic group separate from the greater Arab societies with which they have long been intertwined.

Also, the Mishna was not written in "classic Hebrew" if by "classic Hebrew" we mean the Hebrew of the Hebrew Scriptures.

For one thing, it radically simplifies Biblical Hebrew by replacing most constructs with Aramaic genitives.

For another, it eliminates the Biblical Hebrew tense structure by replacing consecutives with participles.

There is a reason why there are separate published grammars for Mishnaic Hebrew (or as it used to be called, Rabbinic Hebrew).

Also, the Gemara does not follow "hundreds of years later" - the last of the Tannaim were alive while the first Amoraim were teaching.

Mishna: about 200 CE
Jerusalem Talmud: about 400 CE
Babylonia Talmud: about 500 CE

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/talmud_&_mishna.html

...During the centuries following Rabbi Judah’s editing of the Mishna, it was studied exhaustively by generation after generation of rabbis. Eventually, some of these rabbis wrote down their discussions and commentaries on the Mishna’s laws in a series of books known as the Talmud. The rabbis of Palestine edited their discussions of the Mishna about the year 400: Their work became known as the Palestinian Talmud (in Hebrew, Talmud Yerushalmi, which literally means “Jerusalem Talmud”).

More than a century later, some of the leading Babylonian rabbis compiled another editing of the discussions on the Mishna. By then, these deliberations had been going on some three hundred years. The Babylon edition was far more extensive than its Palestinian counterpart, so that the Babylonian Talmud (Talmud Bavli) became the most authoritative compilation of the Oral Law. When people speak of studying “the Talmud,” they almost invariably mean the Bavli rather than the Yerushalmi.

The Talmud’s discussions are recorded in a consistent format. A law from the Mishna is cited, which is followed by rabbinic deliberations on its meaning. The Mishna and the rabbinic discussions (known as the Gemara) comprise the Talmud, although in Jewish life the terms Gemara and Talmud usually are used interchangeably.

The rabbis whose views are cited in the Mishna are known as Tanna’im (Aramaic for “teachers”), while the rabbis quoted in the Gemara are known as Amora’im (”explainers” or “interpreters”). Because the Tanna’im lived earlier than the Amora’im, and thus were in closer proximity to Moses and the revelation at Sinai, their teachings are considered more authoritative than those of the Amora’im. For the same reason, Jewish tradition generally regards the teachings of the Amora’im, insofar as they are expounding the Oral Law, as more authoritative than contemporary rabbinic teachings.

In addition to extensive legal discussions (in Hebrew, halakha), the rabbis incorporated into the Talmud guidance on ethical matters, medical advice, historical information, and folklore, which together are known as aggadata.

As a rule, the Gemara’s text starts with a close reading of the Mishna...

I understand that Christians, especially Catholics, have an alternative to the Jewish history. I’ll just point out that Jewish scholars disagree.

If we stand apart from ideological perspectives and examine the historical evidence, it becomes pretty clear that the whole concept of a canon was unknown until a conflict arose on a larger scale between Jews who were Christians, Jews who were not Christians and the large mass of monotheistic Gentiles who became an important part of that field of conflict.

That's when Christians began insisting on the value of the Septuagint and Perushim became enemies of the Septuagint.

The Septuagint was Greek. I don’t think the language was the problem, and thei is the first I’ve heard that books were excluded from the Bible because they were in Greek.

The Jewish Bible is in Hebrew, all of it. I’m not sure about the Talmud, but it’s possible that the Gemara was in Aramaic. I think it was written in Babylonia, and at any rate, when it was composed, Aramaic was the dominant language of the middle east.

Some the Jewish mystical tracts were in Aramaic, the Zohar, for one, and the Ketubah, the marriage contract, is in Aramaic, as is all but the last verse of the mourners’ prayer.

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