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ARAMAIC

(Heb. ʾăramîṯ)

A Northwest Semitic language closely related to Hebrew. Well attested in multiple dialects and extremely long-lived (modern Aramaic dialects are spoken to this day in parts of the Middle East and elsewhere), its importance for biblical studies cannot be overemphasized. Portions of the OT (Dan. 2:4–7:28; Ezra 4:8–6:8; 7:12-26; Jer. 10:11; Gen. 31:47 [two words only]), and individual words and phrases in the NT are preserved in an Aramaic original. Aramaic was the successor to Akkadian as the international language of communication and diplomacy in the ancient Near East for much of the latter half of the 1st millennium b.c.e., and was a major spoken language during the emergence of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. As such it had a marked influence on late Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew. Two of the major ancient translations of the OT are composed in Aramaic — the Syriac Peshiṭta and the Jewish Targums, as are significant portions of both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds and the entire literary corpus of Syriac Christianity. Lastly, Aramaic textual sources preserve a wealth of invaluable comparative material from all historical periods that touch on a wide range of subjects, such as linguistics, history, literature, epistolography, religion, international relations, and legal theory and practices.

For classificatory purposes, Aramaic may be divided into five principal phases or periods.

Old Aramaic

This is the earliest phase of Aramaic, the lower limit of which is conventionally marked by the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 612). Relatively few inscriptions, written on stone or on other imperishable materials, have survived from this period. But this scarcity of written remains belies the true importance of Aramaic in this period, as it was eventually adopted as the international language of diplomacy (cf. 2 Kgs. 18:26). Linguistically, many of the features which come to characterize later Aramaic dialects are only just emerging in this early phase of the language. However, four innovative linguistic features have been identified which are shared by the early inscriptions and by all succeeding Aramaic dialects: 1) change of vocalic *&x#05D0;n to *r in words such as br “son” (cf. Heb. bēn, Ugar. bn, Phoen. bn; cf. also the words for “daughter” and “two” in later dialects); 2) leveling through of the ending *-nā for the 1st person plural; 3) creation of the causative-reflexive stem *hittaqtal; and 4) complete loss of the niphal stem. These shared innovations constitute Aramaic as a genetic sub-branch of Northwest Semitic, alongside Ugaritic and Canaanite. In addition, the Proto-Semitic phonemic inventory remains basically in place in this early phase, though, owing to the use of the 22-letter Canaanite alphabet, some graphemes stand for more than one phoneme: q = q and ḍ; z = z and ḏ; š = š, ś, and ṭ; ṣ = ṣ and ṯ [=ẓ ]; ḥ = ḥ and ḫ; ʿ = ʿ and ǵ. Otherwise, the Aramaic of this phase is marked by a general lack of standardization and by dialectical diversity. Among the earliest inscriptions are the bilingual Akkadian-Aramaic stela from Tell Fakhariya and the Tell Dan stela, both of which date from the mid-9th century. The latter with its reference to the “House of David” (bytdwd) provides the first extrabiblical reference to the Davidic dynasty. Other notable Old Aramaic inscriptions include the Zakur inscription, a stela whose content strongly resembles that of the biblical Psalms of Thanksgiving, the Sefire Treaty, which is a good source for West Semitic curses, and the Hadad and Panammu inscriptions, which represent a very idiosyncratic Old Aramaic dialect utilized by the kings of ancient Samʾal (modern Zinjirli).

Official Aramaic

This phase of Aramaic, which ends ca. 200, represents a form of the language which is highly standardized and strikingly homogenized. It is in this period that the inventory of features which comes to characterize all later Aramaic dialects is stabilized. Such features include the series of phoneme mergers which differentiates the consonantal inventory of Official Aramaic and later dialects from that of Old Aramaic (ḍ ˃ʿ; ḏ ˃ d; ṯ ˃ t; m [= ẓ] ˃ ṭ; ḫ ˃ ḥ; ǵ ˃ ʿ ), the feminine plural jussive from yiqtĕlān, the peal infinitive form miqtal, the feminine plural nominal ending -ān, and the realization of the category of definiteness as the suffixal ending -āʾ. The name Official Aramaic (or Imperial Aramaic) arises because this dialect is used throughout the Neo-Babylonian and, most especially, the Persian empires. The textual remains from this period are scattered across a large geographical region (Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Armenia, and the Indus Valley) and represent a wide spectrum of genres (letters, legal contracts and deeds, literary texts, incantations, monumental inscriptions), which suggests that what has survived must represent only a fraction of what originally existed. The greatest number of textual finds come from Egypt, where the dry climate is very conducive to the preservation of papyrus and leather, and by far the most significant of the Egyptian finds is the archive from the Jewish military colony at Elephantine. It consists chiefly of letters, various kinds of legal documents, and fragments of literary texts. The Aramaic material from the book of Ezra probably dates from this period as well.

Middle Aramaic

This period dates roughly from ca. 200 b.c.e. to 200 c.e. and represents a phase of the language in which the standardized dialect begins to break down into recognizable regional dialects, a development influenced, no doubt, by the replacement of Aramaic by Greek as the administrative language of the Near East during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Major epigraphic finds come from Palmyra, the Arab kingdom of Petra (Nabatean), Hatra, and Qumran. The Palmyrene texts are an especially rich source for onomastica and information about the marzēaḥ celebration. At Qumran most of the nonsectarian extrabiblical texts are in Aramaic, including the Genesis Apocryphon and the Targum of Job. The Aramaic portions of the book of Daniel come from this period, as do the isolated Aramaic words and phrases in the Greek texts of Josephus and the NT and the legal formulas found in early rabbinic sources. Some of the Targums (Onkelos and Jonathan) and the Aramaic material in Demotic script preserved in Papyrus Amherst 63 may date from this period as well.

Late Aramaic

This phase dates roughly from 200 c.e. to the beginning of the Islamic conquest (ca. 700) and represents the most abundantly attested corpora of literature and inscriptions in Aramaic. Late Aramaic may be divided into three main branches: 1) a Western (Palestinian) branch, consisting of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (including the dialects of the Palestinian Talmud and Targums), Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Samaritan Aramaic; 2) an Eastern (Babylonian) branch, consisting of the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud and Mandaic, the language of a non-Christian gnostic sect from southern Babylonia; and 3) literary Syriac, consisting of the liturgical literature of Syriac Christianity. Syriac is the best-attested Aramaic dialect. In the Eastern dialects, the imperfect verb forms are marked by a prefixed l-, while in Syriac the same form is marked by a prefixed n-. Both contrast with the prefixed y- of earlier dialects. Other linguistic features characteristic of Late Aramaic have been noted as well, including a decline in the absolute and construct states of the noun, increase in the use of the possessive pronoun dil-, replacement of internal passives with prefixed ʾt- forms, and heavy Greek influence.

Modern Aramaic

Several (Neo-)Aramaic dialects are spoken today. These include Maʾlula (a town NE of Damascus), Turoyo and Mlaḥso (spoken in southeastern Turkey), Neo-Syriac (originally spoken in parts of Kurdistan, but now widely scattered), and Neo-Mandaic (spoken in southern Iraq and western Iran).

Bibliography. K. Beyer, The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions (Göttingen, 1986); J. A. Fitzmyer, “The Phases of the Aramaic Language,” A Wandering Aramean (Missoula, 1979), 57-84; repr. The Semitic Background of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1997), 57-84; J. Huehnergard, “Remarks on the Classification of the Northwest Semitic Languages,” in The Balaam Texts from Deir ʾAlla Re-Evaluated, ed. J. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij (Leiden, 1991), 282-93; E. Y. Kutscher, “Aramaic,” in Hebrew and Aramaic Studies, ed. Kutscher et al. (Jerusalem, 1977), 90-155.

F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp