Biblical Aramaic


Biblical Aramaic is the form of Aramaic that is used in the books of Daniel and Ezra in the Hebrew Bible. It should not be confused with the Aramaic paraphrases, explanations and expansions of the Hebrew scriptures, which are known as targumim.

History

As Old Aramaic had served as a lingua franca in the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the 8th century BC, linguistic contact with even the oldest stages of Biblical Hebrew, the main language of the Hebrew Bible, is easily accounted for.
During the Babylonian exile of the Jews which began in the early 6th century BC, the language spoken by the Jews changed from Hebrew to Aramaic, and Aramaic square script replaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the Achaemenid Empire annexed the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, Aramaic became the language of culture and learning. King Darius the Great declared Imperial Aramaic to be the official language of the western half of his empire in 500 BC, and it is that Imperial Aramaic that forms the basis of Biblical Aramaic.
Biblical Hebrew was gradually reduced to the status of a liturgical language and a language of theological learning, and the Jews of the Second Temple period that started in 516 BC would have spoken a western form of Old Aramaic until their partial Hellenization from the 3rd century BC and the eventual emergence of Middle Aramaic in the 3rd century AD.
Biblical Aramaic's relative chronology has been debated mostly in the context of dating the Book of Daniel. In 1929, Rowley argued that its origin must be later than the 6th century BC and that the language was more similar to the Targums than to the Imperial Aramaic documents available at his time.
Others have argued that the language most closely resembles the 5th-century BC Elephantine papyri, and so is a good representative of typical Imperial Aramaic. Kenneth Kitchen takes an agnostic position and states that the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel is compatible with any period from the 5th to early 2nd century BC.

Aramaic and Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew is the main language of the Hebrew Bible. Aramaic accounts for only about 250 verses out of a total of over 23,000. Biblical Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew, as both are in the Northwest Semitic language family. Some obvious similarities and differences are listed below:

Similarities

Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible

Undisputed occurrences