The Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic:
Aramaic (fl. -700 to +600), also called Chaldean, Syrian, Syriac or Assyrian, is the language that Jesus spoke. And Nebuchadrezzar. And most people from Babylon to Jerusalem between about -500 and +600. It was the old imperial tongue of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires. Most of the alphabets of Asia, like those of Arabic, Armenian and Bengali, go back to the Aramaic alphabet.
The Aramaic-speaking world in the time of Christ (pink), in 1000 (purple) and in 2010 (dark red).
- Speakers: 400,000 in 2015, mainly Assyrian and Chaldean Christians.
- Countries: mostly Syria and Iraq, with some in Jordan, Turkey and the US.
- Script: Aramaic alphabet.
- Language family: Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family.
In the -900s, Aramaic was the language of Damascus and its part of Syria. It was a close cousin to Hebrew and Phoenician, written in a form of the Phoenician alphabet.
By -700, it had become a lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire. It remained a lingua franca of the two empires that followed: the Babylonian Empire (-626 to -539) and the Persian Empire (-539 to -323).
The postal service of the Persian Empire stretched from Egypt to what is now Afghanistan. That was made possible in part by Aramaic. If you wanted to send a letter to someone who spoke a different language, you would give it to a sepiru, a scribe-interpreter. He would translate it into Aramaic and send it. When it arrived at its destination, a sepiru at the other end would translate it from Aramaic into the language of the addressee.
It is a good thing that Aramaic extended to Egypt – because it is dry enough for paper to last thousands of years. Most of the ancient writings we have in Aramaic come from Egypt.
By -539, when Jews returned from the Babylonian Captivity, Hebrew was dead. By the rivers of Babylon, Aramaic had become their native language instead. Hebrew would remain a dead language till the 1800s.
Parts of the Bible are written Aramaic:
- Genesis 31:47
- Jeremiah 10:11
- Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26
- Daniel 2:4b–7:28
So are parts of the Talmud.
When Jesus says something in his own language, like when he says, “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?” on the cross, he is speaking in Aramaic. He spoke it with a country accent. We know that because Peter’s Galilean accent gave him away in Jerusalem. Some of Jesus’s sayings rhyme in Aramaic. You can hear Aramaic in the Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of the Christ” (2004).
After +600, with the rise of the Arab Empire, Aramaic was slowly replaced by Arabic. It lived on only among Christians. Because they sent missionaries along the Silk Road, Aramaic writing was seen as far away as northern China by 781. This stage of the language is called Syriac.
A Syriac book from the 1000s from Mount Sinai in Egypt.
By the late 1980s, there were 1.4 million Aramaic speakers, mostly Chaldean (Catholic) and Assyrian (Nestorian) Christians in northern Mesopotamia in Iraq and Syria.
By 2015, there were only 400,000 Aramaic speakers left! Muslim extremists, like ISIS, are driving them out of their homelands. That is bad news for Aramaic: when people move to another country, their language is often not passed on to their children or grandchildren. That is how Hebrew became a dead language by the rivers of Babylon.
– Abagond, 2015, 2018.
Sources: The Christian Post (2015), “Empires of the Word” (2005) by Nicholas Ostler.
See also:
Abagond 
“the other N word” In Iraq the people that speak Aramaic, are sometimes driven from their homes, and eventually maybe killed. It usually starts with the symbol for the letter “N”. meaning Nazarene, that is what Christians are called there. I asked you to post on this months ago Abagond.
They put a symbol on the homes so when the radicals , (That often times are funded and armed directly by the U.S. and our allies such as Saudi Arabia and TurkeY) so when the radicals show up they know who to target. They are given a choice.. leave, pay a heavy tax that no one could afford, or die. Obviously those with young families are leaving. Many are dying. Glad you finally covered it after it was all over the news Abagond.
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When are you going to do an article on Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish)?
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Very enlightening and very informative post. I throughly enjoyed this post. Please do more.
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Great post Abagond, this is quite informative and do some more please! 🙂
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I learned a lot today, kudos Abagond!
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Personally, I believe the Lord spoke many different languages, after all, Yahawashi was/is the CHRIST! Furthermore, when Jesus was resurrected after three days, he met Paul on the road to Damascus and asked: ” Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” And he said, “Who are You, Lord?” Then the Lord said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9:1-8).
Apostle Paul’s name was Saul prior to converting and becoming a believer. Paul became a believer after speaking with Jesus after the resurrection, on the road to Damascus. At that time, Paul was also in the process of bringing harm to the Lord’s disciples due to being a non-believer at that point.
Apostle Paul was a Greek citizen, born in Tarsus, Italy of the tribe of Benjamin. In all likelihood, Jesus spoke to him in Greek, at least while he was on the road to Damascus. Again, Jesus (Yahawashi) performed many miracles and therefore, we shouldn’t limit his potential to speaking only one language.
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Aramaic after the rise of Islam seems like Coptic: languages absorbed or erased by Arabic. People forget that the early Arab empires/caliphates tried not to change local cultures too heavily and had a vested interest in not converting subjugated people for taxation purposes, which allowed Christianity and other languages to flourish for centuries.
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Aaaaaaaaah, that explains why Jews were speaking Aramaic instead of Hebrew. Now I get it!
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@ talibmensah
Some argue that the reason that the Arabs could take over Egypt and Syria with relative ease was that the local Christians faced less religious pressure from them than from the Byzantine Empire.
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^^^ Right. To the Byzantine Empire, they were heretics to be persecuted, to the Arabs they were just Christians, who were made to pay more in taxes.
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The problem is ‘Jesus’s existence isn’t even considered ‘factual’. Some of the more ancient Pharaohs of Egypt have a more ‘factual’ evidence of existence and thus a part of history.
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“Most of the alphabets of Asia, like those of Arabic, Armenian and Bengali, go back to the Aramaic alphabet.”
I recently learned that some of the Asian alphabets which are derived from the Aramaic one are written vertically:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_alphabet
I’d run across some photos of old Manchu manuscripts, noticed that their writing looked like Arabic turned sideways, and was curious enough to google it. I was not expecting it to trace directly back to Aramaic!
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