United States or Andorra ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He had never, I suppose, been accustomed to use the Greek familiarly in his own country; had never written in it at all, and it is not strange that he should express himself awkwardly when he first began to write Greek; that the Aramaic idioms should constantly reproduce themselves in his Greek sentences.
With these ideas Jesus was familiar; whether he ever read the books must remain a question. This literature exists for us only in translations made in the days of the early church. Most of these books were originally written in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, or in Aramaic, the language of Palestine in the time of Jesus.
Esh-Baal, the successor of Saul in Gilead, was the enemy of both: his frontier adjoined that of Ammon, while between him and the King of Judah there was perpetual war. David had strengthened himself by marrying the daughter of the king of the Aramaic district of Geshur, which bounded Gilead on the north, and Ammonites and Aramæans were in close alliance with each other.
Ionian colonists came to Tarsus in very early times; and Ramsay is confident that Tarshish, 'the son of Javan, in Gen. x. 4, is none other than Tarsus. The Greek settlers, of course, mixed with the natives, and the Oriental element gradually swamped the Hellenic. The coins of Tarsus show Greek figures and Aramaic lettering.
The catastrophe occurred some few decades after the correspondence comes to an end for us. Mitani vanished from the states of Western Asia and gave place to small Aramaic kingdoms, while the eastern boundary, together with Ninua, was seized by Assyria as the first step to her subsequent suzerainty in the East. But still more swiftly overtaken of fate was the XVIIIth Dynasty in Egypt.
In the upper strata of the ruins of Nippur, hundreds of clay bowls were found, inscribed with Jewish inscriptions, in the Aramaic dialect that was spoken by the Babylonian Jews. Similar bowls were found elsewhere in the mounds of the Euphrates Valley. These bowls indicate the presence of Jews in various parts of the country.
The Aramaic has the character of a degraded language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on a primitive type. In some respects Phoenician is even closer to Assyro-Babylonian than Hebrew is e.g. in preferring at to ah for the feminine singular termination. The testimony of history to the origin of the Phoenicians is the following.
Such learned proselytes arose in Aquila and Theodotion each of whom made a Greek version of the Bible; while the orthodox Jew hardly regards his Hebrew text as complete unless accompanied by the Aramaic version popularly ascribed to the proselyte Onkelos.
No people on earth was great enough by its own efforts to create either the marvel of Hellenic or at a later period the marvel of Christian culture; history has produced these most brilliant results only where the ideas of Aramaic religion have sunk into an Indo-Germanic soil.
Until the last century it was commonly supposed that no close relation existed, and that the Alexandrian and Palestinian schools were independent and opposed; Scaliger, the greatest scholar of the seventeenth century, wrote that "Philo was more ignorant of Hebraic and Aramaic lore than any Gaul or Scythian," and this was the opinion generally held.
Word Of The Day