Aramaic peshitta

[FelixC]

does anyone understand Aramaic?

I found this site, referencing its connection to Hebrew & Arabic
Aramaic is the ancient language of the Semitic family group, which includes the Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Arameans, Hebrews, and Arabs. In fact, a large part of the Hebrew and Arabic languages is borrowed from Aramaic, including the Alphabet. The modern Hebrew (square) script is called "Ashuri", "Ashuri" is the Hebrew name for Assyrian, the name being used to signify the ancestor of the Assyrians, Ashur the son of Shem, the son of Noah (Genesis 10:22).
http://www.peshitta.org/

[Fraggle Rocker]

I found this site, referencing its connection to Hebrew & ArabicThe Semitic languages are one branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. "Afro-Asiatic" replaced the older name "Semitic-Hamitic." Its other branches are Berber (including Tuareg), Chadic (including Hausa, the lingua franca of West Africa), Cushitic (including Somali) and Egyptian (including Ancient Egyptian and Modern Coptic).

There is no consensus on the location of the Urheimat or prehistoric homeland of the speakers of original Proto-Afro-Asiatic, but I'd say opinion is leaning toward what is now Egypt. North Africa had been abandoned by the ethnic group we now call sub-Saharan Africans, as it became a desert unsuitable for both Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and almost-Neolithic pastoral nomads. Roughly 40,000 years after Homo sapiens first walked out of Africa, a few of their descendants reversed the migration across Suez and recolonized North Africa, particularly the Nile region, using the animal husbandry techniques developed in southwestern Asia in the Agricultural Revolution that began around 9500BCE.

They became so successful that they traveled back into Asia again, and the Semitic tribes became the dominant population in western Mesopotamia.

The Semitic branch includes many of the key languages of the ancient Middle East, such as Akkadian, Amorite, Ugaritic, Moabite and Phoenician. Modern Semitic languages include Hebrew, Arabic, Assyrian, Amharic (the language of Ethiopia), Harari, Maltese, Tigre and Aramaic.

Aramaic is a generic name for a large and important spectrum of closely related languages or dialects that were widely spoken throughout the Middle East from the second millennium BCE up through the first millennium CE. The Jews spoke Aramaic and only used Hebrew as a liturgical language during, perhaps, most of the biblical era. Much of the Torah and most of the Talmud were written in Aramaic, and it was the language of Palestine in the time when Jesus is said to have lived. Aramaic is now restricted to less than half a million speakers of one more-or-less standard dialect. Modern Aramaic is often called "Syriac" because of its numerous speakers in Syria, but Syriac is more properly the name of the standardized medieval Aramaic language that was the lingua franca of the entire Middle East until the Islamic era, when it was slowly replaced by Arabic.

Syriac, or medieval Aramaic, was the language used to spread Christianity eastward, through regions where Greek and Latin were not used. Peshitta is a Syriac word meaning "simple." There is no international convention for naming what we call in English the "New Testament," and in Syriac it was called the Peshitta.

[mathman]

"Much of the Torah and most of the Talmud were written in Aramaic,"
My understanding is that the Jewish bible (Torah) was all in Hebrew, while the Talmud is mostly Aramaic.

[Fraggle Rocker]

My understanding is that the Jewish bible (Torah) was all in Hebrew, while the Talmud is mostly Aramaic.From a Jewish website: (http://comics.com/the_knight_life/2009-01-01/)3. Hebrew's Helper

In addition to the Talmud, there are several other Jewish books written in Aramaic: much of the Book of Daniel, as well as much of the Zohar, and other books of Kabbalah. In times of persecution, when Jews were forbidden to read, write, pray or converse in Hebrew, Aramaic was used as a substitute. (For this reason, there are several prayers set exclusively to Aramaic.) Aramaic has thus acquired a semi-sanctified state; it is considered almost as holy as the Holy Tongue itself--Hebrew.From a secular website: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_(language))Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship. It is the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud and Zohar. Aramaic was the native language of Jesus. . . .From another secular source: (http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Book+of+Ezra)Ezra, book of the Bible

Ezra, book of the Bible, combined with Nehemiah in the Septuagint to form the book 2 Esdras. In the Vulgate, Ezra and Nehemiah are called 1 and 2 Esdras respectively. Ezra, like Nehemiah, is the work of the Chronicler (see Chronicles) and narrates the history of the Jews from 538 B.C. to c.458 B.C. as follows: the decree of the Persian king Cyrus permitting the Jews to return to Palestine from captivity under the leadership of Sheshbazzar; the return of Zerubbabel with a certain number to Jerusalem in c.520 B.C. where they complete the task of rebuilding the Temple despite opposition; and the return of Ezra, priest and scribe, to Jerusalem in c.458 B.C. with orders from King Artaxerxes I to restore the Jewish law. It is possible, however, that Ezra might have returned after Nehemiah in c.398 B.C. during the reign of Artaxerxes II. The text is not clear which Artaxerxes is meant. A substantial passage of Ezra is in Aramaic.

[mathman]

It looks like (from the quotes you gave) that the Jewish bible is almost all in Hebrew. Daniel and Ezra form a very small part and are late additions. According to Jewish tradition, the bible is divided into three main sections - the five books of Moses (Law), Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and the prophets), and Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, etc.) The Law is considered holiest - sometimes the word Torah is used to mean this part only. The Prophets books are ranked higher than the Writings.

[Medicine*Woman]

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M*W: My question is regarding the translations of Aramaic to English and Hebrew to English. What significant differences, if any, were these languages (i.e. mistakes) written into the English versions?

[Fraggle Rocker]

Originally posted by Medicine*Woman: My question is regarding the translations of Aramaic to English and Hebrew to English. What significant differences, if any, were these languages (i.e. mistakes) written into the English versions?The Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_Bible_translations) article confirms what I've been told over the years about the translation of the Bible into English. Until the invention of the printing press made the original Hebrew and Greek texts more available in England, the various English Bibles were translations of the Latin translation (and occasionally the French translation). By the time Englishmen set about to translate the books directly from the original languages into English, they had not only the Latin and French versions, but a number of predecessors in Middle English which were taken from Latin and French. This gave the new translators a bounty of work from the earlier translators to correlate, in order to weed out mistakes in their own text.

What may be more of a problem occurred when King James authorized his own translation project. The Puritan faction of the Church of England was gaining power which he sought to curtail. The King James Bible, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Bible#Prior_English_Bible_Translations) therefore, was created under his command with a number of words deliberately chosen for political reasons, rather than for religious, historical or linguistic accuracy.

Without making a larger research project out of this, I'm not finding any references to English translators specifically using source material in Aramaic. All the references are to Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the new. Clearly the Aramaic portions of the Torah were indeed translated into Hebrew at some point, because today Orthodox Jews only read the Torah in Hebrew. My guess--and this is only an educated guess based on reasoning and my knowledge of history--is that this translation would have been performed long before King James's project. Remember that even though Jews spoke Aramaic among themselves, they preferred to use Hebrew in the liturgy except when such use was outlawed by an occupying government. More than a millennium elapsed between the writing of Daniel and Ezra and the printing of the books that King James's scholars used: plenty of time for Jews to take advantage of the respite of a tolerant Gentile government somewhere in the Diaspora, and translate those two books into Hebrew. (And there were a few. Not everyone was as hard on the Jews as the European Christians.) From that point on, anyone looking for the "original" version of the Old Testament would have been handed one entirely in Hebrew because that was the version the Jews held dearest.

Hebrew is a sacred language to devout Jews. This attitude persists (AFAIK) today, within Chassidic communities who refuse to "profane" Hebrew by speaking it outside the temple, and instead use Yiddish as a vernacular.

So I don't see any overwhelming reason to presume that any portion of the King James Bible--the standard English language version until rather recently--was translated directly from Aramaic. Of course that doesn't make me right.