Interesting Facts about Aramaic

Random Facts about Aramaic

Facts About

Random Facts about Aramaic

The language used by Christ was the Aramaic, the dialect of Northern Syria. The Israelites were much in contact with Aramaean populations, and some words from that tongue became incorporated into the Hebrew at a very early date. At the time of Hezekiah, Aramaic had become the official language of both Judea and Assyria: that is, the language spoken at the courts.

After the fall of Samaria the Hebrew inhabitants of Northern Israel were largely carried into captivity, and their place was taken by colonists from Syria, who probably spoke Aramaic as their mother tongue.

The fall of the Jewish Kingdom hastened the decay of Hebrew as a spoken language--not that the captives forgot their own language, as is generally assumed, but after the return to Judea the Jews found themselves, a people few in number, among a large number of surrounding populations using the Aramaic tongue. When the latest books of the Old Testament were written, Hebrew, though still the language of literature, had been supplanted by Aramaic as the language of common life. From that time on the former tongue was the exclusive property of scholars, and has no history save that of a merely literary language.