Aramaic peshitta

The 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.

 

From a Jewish website:

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The Wikipedia 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, 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.