Aramaic The Biblical flood happened circa 2400 BC according to Dr. Kent Hovind whom bases his calculations on the genealogy of Adam detailed in Genesis 5 . If Abraham (c.2000 BC) spoke Hebrew, that means Hebrew was the language of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia where he was born and raised. Nimrod was Noahs grandson, so the Tower of Babel was built within 100 years after Noah landed on Mt. Ararat. When the people of Mesopotamia where spread across the earth because their speech was confused, there remained in Mesopotamia, what was obviously the dominant or perhaps even the original language of the region. Many people hold to the theory that Hebrew pre-dates Aramaic, suggesting that Hebrew is one of the languages that was created at Babel or is the original language spoken in the Eden and the whole world prior to the Tower of Babel. If this is the case, then Hebrew would have been the dominant language of the region among the various nations that proliferated in the Mid-East after Babel. It would have been the language of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabs and the Canaanites that inhabited the Holy Land before Joshua conquered it c.1400 BC. This idea is not consistent with historical or Biblical records. What is consistent though as well as supported by archaeology, is the theory that Aramaic was the dominant language of the region from the tower of Babel onward, and is the mother tongue of several north-west Semitic languages such as Syriac also known as Eastern Aramaic, as well as the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian language of Akkadian, and the Nile River region Archaic Egyptian language. This would easily explain why communication between Israel and its neighbours was so easy within the context of the Biblical narrative as well as why Biblical characters could travel to other nations and have no problem communicating with the natives. It is anthropologically inconsistent to claim that Abraham spoke several languages since he was born and raised in the same place. Learning a language from passing by travellers is not a practical theory either. Later on in world history multi-cultural/multi-lingual societies were a product of conquest and empire between the nations. Abraham was born approximately 400 years after the flood, not much conquering and empire building could be done in 400 years if the original world population was 8 people, therefore from the time of Babel, fear of the unknown, frustration, mistrust and innate hostility to change, motivated people who could not understand each other to move as far away from each other as possible. In Genesis 11 God confused the languages of the people so that they had no choice but to disperse, because they refused to obey God’s command to spread out across the whole earth. Abraham, whom spoke Aramaic left Ur of the Chaldeans and travelled to Canaan, where the people too spoke Aramaic just 300 years after Babel. He also fathered Ishmael, the father of the Arabs. This is why Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages, because they both come from Aramaic, the mother tongue of Hebrew and Arabic, and the language of Abraham, the father of Israel and his illegitimate son Ishmael, through his Egyptian mother Hagar, whom also spoke Aramaic. The fact that Aramaic comes in so many dialects as a product of being spoken by so many nations over such a long period of time is proof that Aramaic was the dominant language of the Middle-East region immediately after the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Aramaic as a language has survived, to this day. The Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab and Turkish Empires, as well as the Arab nationalism of the 20th century that has produced the regions present international borders and national identities, that have dominated the Middle-East ever since the non-Aramaic speaking nation of the Medo-Persians conquered Babylon in 536 BC. Aramaic was permitted as an official language among the subjects of the Persian Empire for the 2 centuries the Persians ruled the region because they themselves were an empire made of various peoples. The Egyptian slavery of the Jews was between c. 1800-1400 BC. This is where the Hebrews, isolated from all other nations in their slavery, developed Hebrew, the language Moses scribed the Torah in c. 1400 BC. This explains why the other nations of the mid-east spoke Aramaic, including the Assyrians whom conquered Israel in 722 BC, and the Babylonians which conquered the Jewish southern Kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. This is why Aramaic has been preserved throughout the centuries despite the Jews moving on to Hebrew. The Samaritans (Jewish/Gentile half breeds) of Jesus time spoke Aramaic because not only was the northern kingdom of Israel conquered in 722 BC by the Assyrians, and their people sent into exile across the mid-east, but also after most of the Jews were killed or exiled to Babylon in 586 BC, the remnant of Jews in the Holy Land intermarried with the Idumeans, which moved into the region after the exiles began. The Idumeans, like Israels other neighbours, spoke Aramaic. Aramaic was the language of the Babylonians as well, and retained official status within the Achaemenid Persian Empire for 2 centuries until the Greeks conquered and Hellenized the region, c. 330 BC. Throughout the mid-east, its inhabitants continued to speak Aramaic well past the time of Christ until the Arabs conquered the region and imposed Arabic throughout the Middle-East and North Africa. Aramaic survives to this day in 3 remote villages in Syria and is currently existentially threatened by Islamic militants that are committing genocide against the Christians of the region. Aramaic, was once the lingua franca of the whole Middle East, with inscriptions found from Egypt to China and India, still lingers in a few islands of speakers — some 15,000 speakers of Western Aramaic, in Syria, and perhaps half a million speakers of Eastern Aramaic in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and a Western Diaspora. Most of these speakers are Christian, but there are Muslim speakers in Syria, and others are Jewish, Samaritan, or Mandaean. It is also of course the liturgical language of several Eastern Christian denominations, Karaite Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeanism. Eastern Aramaic languages have developed from the varieties of Aramaic that developed in and around Mesopotamia, as opposed to western varieties of the Levant. Historically, eastern varieties of Aramaic have been more dominant, mainly due to their political acceptance in the Neo-Assyrian and Achaemenid Persian empires. With the later loss of political platforms to Greek and Persian, Aramaic continued to be used by the population. In the region of Babylonia, rabbinical schools flourished, producing the Targumim and Talmud, making the language a standard of religious scholarship. In northern Mesopotamia, the local variety of eastern Aramaic, known as Syriac, became a standard language among Christians, used in the Peshitta and by the poet Ephrem, and in the schools of Edessa and Nisibis, and by the Saint Thomas Christians in India. Among the Mandaean community of Khuzestan, another variety of eastern Aramaic, known as Mandaic, became the liturgical language of the religion. These varieties have widely influenced the less prominent western varieties of Aramaic, and the three literary, classical languages outlined above have also influenced numerous vernacular varieties of eastern Aramaic, some of which are spoken to this day (see Neo-Aramaic languages). Since the Arab conquest, most of the population of the area has undergone a language shift to Arabic. Western Aramaic languages is a group of several Aramaic dialects developed and once widely spoken throughout the ancient Levant, as opposed to those from in and around Mesopotamia which make up what is known as the Eastern Aramaic languages. All of the Western Aramaic languages are today extinct, with the sole exception of Western Neo-Aramaic. Following the rise of Islam and ensuing mass conversions of the local indigenous populations, cultural and linguistic Arabization of the new Muslims, but also the remaining Christians, soon followed, and the Arabic language displaced various Aramaic languages (including the Western Aramaic varieties) as the mother tongue of the majority of the people. Despite this, Western Aramaic appears to have survived for a relatively long time at least in some villages in mountainous areas of the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon (in modern Syria). In fact, up until the 17th century, travelers in the Lebanon still reported on several Aramaic-speaking villages. Today, Western Neo-Aramaic is the sole surviving remnant of the entire Western branch of the Aramaic languages, spoken by no more than a few thousand people in the Anti-Lebanon of Syria. The speakers consist of both Muslims (despite their Islamization) and Christians who managed to escape cultural and linguistic Arabization due to the remote mountainous isolation of their villages.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:55:50 +0000
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