Aramaic

A History of the First World Language

Holger Gzella

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781467461429
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística histórica y comparativa

In this volume—the first complete history of Aramaic from its origins to the present day—Holger Gzella provides an accessible overview of the language perhaps most well known for being spoken by Jesus of Nazareth. Gzella, one of the world's foremost Aramaicists, begins with the earliest evidence of Aramaic in inscriptions from the beginning of the first millennium BCE, then traces its emergence as the first world language when it became the administrative tongue of the great ancient Near Eastern empires. He also pays due diligence to the sacred role of Aramaic within Judaism, its place in the Islamic world, and its contact with other regional languages, before concluding with a glimpse into modern uses of Aramaic.

Although Aramaic never had a unified political or cultural context in which to gain traction, it nevertheless flourished in the Middle East for an extensive period, allowing for widespread cultural exchange between diverse groups of people. In tracing the historical thread of the Aramaic language, readers can also gain a stronger understanding of the rise and fall of civilizations, religions, and cultures in that region over the course of three millennia.

Aramaic: A History of the First World Language is visually supplemented by maps, charts, and other images for an immersive reading experience, providing scholars and casual readers alike with an engaging overview of one of the most consequential world languages in history.

1

INTRODUCTION

THE IMPORTANCE OF ARAMAIC

Aramaic is everywhere. This conclusion is inescapable to any student of the rich history of Hebrew’s once domineering sister language, now well known only to specialists. The name, at least, is familiar to many people. Aramaic forms part of the Western literary canon, since sections of the Bible were written in it. These include the court stories from the book of Daniel, chapters 2–7, which inspired generations of writers, painters, and composers. Jesus, too, almost certainly spoke in Aramaic when he formulated the Lord’s Prayer and the parables that are preserved in the New Testament. In popular culture, Aramaic figures as the language of hoary wisdom texts or a means to communicate with spirits and demons.

In everyday life, we encounter the endless varieties of Aramaic in many ways. The well-known expression “feet of clay” comes from the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about a strong-looking but ultimately vulnerable colossus in Daniel 2; its feet of clay are its Achilles’s heel. Rembrandt’s famous painting Belshazzar’s Feast depicts “the writing on the wall” of Daniel 5, a prophecy of doom written in fiery Aramaic letters. Walk into any Indian restaurant and you can have your pick of tandoori dishes, a name that derives from Aramaic tannur “oven,” brought to South Asia by the Persian Empire. The Kaddish, one of the most important Jewish prayers—put to music by Ravel—is written in Aramaic. The New Testament’s talitha kum, Aramaic for “arise, girl,” was left unchanged in the Greek text of Mark 5:41 as a ritual phrase and still appears that way in English translations. In recent years we have heard much about the destruction of ancient statues from Palmyra, which often bear Aramaic inscriptions. Movies like The Exorcist or The Passion of the Christ occasionally or even mainly show characters speaking broken Aramaic. Cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago, and Detroit are home to large Aramaic-speaking communities; you might also overhear people chatting in an Aramaic dialect while waiting for the London Tube or on a Toronto subway car. And so it goes on and on.

These are the gravitational waves of a culture with an ancient history, starting around 1000 BCE, reaching the present. The Jewish and Christian scriptures were canonized in an Aramaic-speaking world and largely shaped by it, affecting the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew to this day, as was the Qur’an, which contains a number of Aramaic loanwords. The empires of the ancient Near East, which at a certain point even reached Afghanistan and Pakistan, were administered in Aramaic. Aramaic has formed an inextricable part of Jewish textual culture up to the present day. At the same time, it forms the foundations of the native Christian tradition of the Middle East. Even the “Hebrew” letter shapes, also known as square script, and the Arabic alphabet have their origins in Aramaic writing systems. Especially due to its importance for biblical studies, Aramaic has been present at Western universities in some shape or another since the Early Modern period. It is still in active use by minorities who left their homeland in search of a better life, ending up in North America, Australia, or Europe. Despite the best efforts of those in power from antiquity onward—including university administrators—Aramaic continues to survive.

This history makes Aramaic a strong binding agent connecting the ancient Near East and the modern Middle East, despite all the social, political, and cultural changes this region has undergone through the ages. Its historical reception illustrates two of the West’s main associations with the Middle East: ancient civilizations and modern conflicts. Aramaic also forms the shared backdrop of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and smaller but still vital religions like those of the Samaritans and the Mandeans. It is not an exaggeration to state that Aramaic was the most important Middle Eastern language between the age of the ancient world empires and the coming of Islam. The question of why this language in particular has proven to be so resilient is rooted in three thousand years of history; trying to answer it opens up a fascinating field of research. On account of its complexity and its fragmentation over a host of academic disciplines, however, an accessible yet scientifically grounded overview of the cultural history of Aramaic is lacking. This book aims to change that—to systematically reveal the relationships between the different kinds of Aramaic and to illustrate their cultural impact.

So, what is Aramaic? The name, which was already in use in antiquity, is derived from the place-name Aram, which originally roughly coincided with the area of the Syrian Desert. The original meaning of the word remains unknown; according to Genesis 10:22, the ancestor of the Arameans bore the same name, but this is probably a later tradition. As an adjective used to refer to the Aramaic language and script, the word is first attested around 500 BCE.¹ From a modern historical-linguistic point of view, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic language family, together with Hebrew, Arabic, and several other languages formerly and sometimes still spoken from Ethiopia to Mesopotamia (although none can boast of a longer continuous history than Aramaic). Within this family, it belongs to the subgroup that is now normally referred to as Northwest Semitic.²

This relationship is easy to spot, even to the untrained eye, just as one can often clearly see the resemblance between different family members without being able to define exactly what they have in common—the human brain is often quite good at quickly recognizing patterns. Medieval Jewish grammarians noticed the parallels between Aramaic malk, Hebrew melekh, and Arabic malik. These words all mean “king” and apparently all derive from the same Semitic proto-form, just as English king, German König, and Dutch koning all developed from the same older Germanic word. Explaining what exactly this relatedness entails and how it works in detail is slightly more complicated. Drawing a family tree of languages presupposes a shared historical background, just like a biological family tree of a group of plant or animal species. Moreover, it implies that once a certain group of speakers broke away from a formerly unified population, the languages generally developed independently. This model is based on systematic, significant correspondences between sounds, in the first place, and consequently between grammatical forms and words. (Since there are infinitely more words than basic sounds in any language, it also occurs that some words that are historically completely unrelated happen to sound similar. Of course, we cannot draw any historical conclusions from such coincidences.) Mutual contact between speakers due to geographical proximity or social interactions can slowly reintroduce shared developments to the individual languages, making it difficult to say whether some parallels were inherited from a common ancestor, were borrowed from one language to the other at a later point in time, or resulted from parallel innovation.³

Thus, only systematic and nontrivial resemblances and differences allow us to rationally define languages, differentiate them from one other, and investigate their relationships (an endeavor known as classification) and eventually to make them the subject of a dedicated scholarly discipline. This also holds for Aramaic: despite the great diversity that resulted from its long and decentralized history, its unified beginnings are reflected in certain characteristic words and grammatical phenomena that recur in every Aramaic language. That is why we can speak about Aramaic as one entity. The concept is primarily a linguistic one and does not imply any coherent ethnic or sociocultural existence of one homogeneous Aramaic people. The latter does play a certain role as a nostalgic ideal in the identity construction of modern Aramaic speakers, and in certain periods, “Aramaic” was also used in the general sense of “pagan.” But those meanings are secondary.⁴

This overarching concept of Aramaic, strictly a historical-linguistic abstraction, is made more concrete by various terms for the various Aramaic languages (or dialects, where we are mainly dealing with regional vernaculars without a written tradition; the neutral term variety includes both categories). Some of these are clear and unambiguous, such as “Syriac” for the literary standard language of Syriac Christianity or “Biblical Aramaic” for the Aramaic portions of the Old Testament. Others, on the other hand, are ambiguous, such as “Jewish Aramaic,” which actually covers language varieties that are historically and regionally very different. (Jewish Aramaic was formerly also known as “Chaldean,” as Daniel 2:4 depicts the Chaldeans, the sages and oracle priests at the Babylonian court, as speaking Aramaic, and the Aramaic of the book of Daniel reached us in the same script as the other Jewish Aramaic written languages.) Or scholars use the same terms to refer to different historical periods, as with “Old Aramaic” or “Imperial Aramaic.” Others still are just misleading, such as “Modern Syriac” for the modern spoken languages, which do not directly descend from Syriac. When discussing what a certain word or phrase is “in Aramaic,” then, we always have to specify which period, region, or culture is meant, unlike Classical Latin, for instance.

Unlike Hebrew and Arabic studies—fields that originally also focused on the study of language but increasingly came to be overshadowed by their offspring, Old Testament exegesis and Islamic studies, as the twentieth century progressed—there was no separate academic tradition of Aramaic studies. This is immediately reflected in the aforementioned terminological heterogeneity and the lack of other fixed standards such as agreed-upon systems of Romanization. Such diversity in the discourse about Aramaic is due to both the great internal variety of Aramaic, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fact that the individual language varieties did not develop in the context of one continuous Aramaic culture or civilization that could sensibly form the subject of its own academic discipline. Hence, their internal coherence is much less obvious and only appears from a historical point of view. Accordingly, Aramaic is hardly ever studied for its own sake (although I hope to show here how rewarding such a study can be), but only for practical purposes: as a tool to render textual sources accessible to further inquiry. These sources, though, are essential to research in the fields of biblical studies, Jewish studies, the study of Eastern Christianity, the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, minorities in the modern Middle East, the early history of Islam, and, increasingly, general linguistics (roughly in that order, historically speaking).

For the most part, Aramaic is thus studied as a crucial but subservient element in several well-established, mainly philological and historical disciplines and social sciences. Even in the academic world, only few people see any inherent value that transcends the disciplinary boundaries in this language family. But any responsible use of a language, be it a language course, a practical grammar, or a translation, must be grounded in fundamental, not merely utilitarian, research. Only the latter aims to uncover the deepest workings of the grammatical system, what the words in texts from a certain period really mean, and which historical circumstances influenced the language’s development.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARAMAIC STUDIES

For the reasons mentioned above, the study of Aramaic did not result in a completely separate set of academic institutions, with its own research units, chairs, conferences, and study programs. The history of Aramaic studies has therefore always been interwoven with the broader context:⁵ the historical tradition of “oriental philology,” with a clear focus on the original languages of the Bible; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ mainly secular, empirical study of Semitic languages and literatures; and now the increasingly interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world, sociologically influenced religious studies, and descriptive linguistics. The language’s dispersion over quite varied political entities and religiocultural groups is thus remarkably paralleled by the institutional embedding of the field in different academic disciplines. Perhaps it is precisely this flexibility that has allowed Aramaic to maintain its position, albeit at a small scale, in universities’ study and research programs in times of far-reaching reorganizations. As Aramaic can easily be integrated into completely different frameworks, it is basically immune to the irrational likes and dislikes, the bizarre flowchart aesthetics and managerial groupthink that motivate so many decisions at today’s academic institutions. History shows that every university can profit from one or two people with a command of a few Aramaic languages. The discovery of dozens of Aramaic manuscripts at Qumran revolutionized biblical studies and the history of Judaism some seventy years ago, and the use of Aramaic as a world language makes it an important contributor to the current fascination for ancient world empires.

While Jewish scholars never stopped studying Aramaic texts since antiquity and Syriac Christendom even developed a native grammatical tradition, academic Aramaic studies in the West originated in the sixteenth century’s renewed interest in the text of the Bible in its original languages. The Reformers’ primary aim was to regain access to the foundation of the Christian faith, the Holy Writ. In order to do so, it was essential to understand what the texts really said and, in the Reformers’ view, to break free from the Latin Bible translation (the Vulgate) and the buildup of ecclesiastical traditions that the Catholic Church saw as normative and another source of revelation—an impossible goal, as it turned out, since knowledge of an extinct language stems from tradition itself. In those days, Aramaic was mainly known from the biblical passages in Ezra and Daniel; Syriac and the different Aramaic languages of Jewish traditional literature initially received less attention.

As a part of the original text of the biblical canon, Aramaic was, to a small degree, the language of inspired revelation, alongside (and overshadowed by) Hebrew for the rest of the Old Testament and Greek for the New. Old translations into Aramaic such as the Syriac Christian Bible and the Jewish targums also afforded a better understanding of difficult Hebrew concepts and expressions. A relatively high number of Hebrew words only occur once in the whole Bible, without their meaning being clear from context. Also, some passages are hard to understand, especially poetic texts, sometimes due to copying errors that arose during the centuries-long transmission process. Because the old translations are much closer to the original text than the medieval biblical manuscripts and the early printed editions that were based on them, they often contain indirect clues to the correct interpretation, and not just as regards the presumed original meaning of a word. Sometimes also the translator correctly rendered an expression from the still uncorrupted original text, while copyists introduced mistakes into the expression that would be perpetuated in later ...