The Semitic language, spoken by the Arameans of northern Syria and northwestern Mesopotamia, is called Aramaic.
It is classified as a Semitic language and has close affinities with Amorite and Hebrew. Although the Aramean states lost their political independence during the time of the Assyrian conquests of the 8th century BC. BC , the Aramaic language gradually spread throughout the Near East and replaced Akkadian, the language of Assyria and Babylonia, as the lingua franca of the Persian empire.
During the time of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem (701 BC), Hebrew was the language used by the Jews and Aramaic was the language used in official transactions with Assyria. The Assyrian Rab-saces, Sennacherib’s representative, spoke to the people in Hebrew, but Hezekiah’s messengers made sure that they understood Aramaic (2 Kings 18:26). By Ezra’s time, however, the situation was reversed. The large congregation gathered to hear the law no longer used Hebrew as its official language. The people were attentive and Ezra and his associates † œread the book of the law of God clearly, and put the sense, so that they understood the reading † (Neh. 8: 8). The phrase translated “and they put the sense” is the exact Hebrew equivalent of the Aramaic word used to read an official document in the vernacular, a process that is understood as translation. During the exile, the Jews adopted Aramaic, so it became necessary for the Hebrew law to be translated into the vernacular.
Translations of Scripture into Aramaic, known as Targums, were oral rather than written until the first centuries of the Christian era. Hebrew was used by religious leaders and never disappeared as the language of prayer and scripture. It was used by the Qumran community as the language of devotion and instruction as late as the 1st century AD. AD Most Jews, however, used Aramaic as the language of daily life.
The *alphabet in which Aramaic was written had a simplicity that made it possible to replace the complicated cuneiform syllables of Akkadian and the ancient Hebrew-Phoenician alphabet. The advantage of the alphabetic script over the syllabic script undoubtedly accelerated the trend for Aramaic to replace Akkadian as the official language of the Near East.
The Israelites had continuous contact with the Aramaic-speaking peoples from the time of the patriarchs to the end of Old Testament history. Some portions of the Bible were written in Aramaic and others show the Aramaic influence of vocabulary and grammar. Large portions of Daniel (2:4-7:28) and Ezra (4:8-6:18; 7:12-26) were written in Aramaic as well as a verse in Jeremiah (10:11) and the place called Jegar Sahaduta, mentioned by Laban (Gen. 31:47).
A significant amount of non-biblical material is available to the student of pre-Christian Aramaic literature. This includes inscriptions from Aramaic city-states and documents written in the official Aramaic of the Persian Empire.
Aramaic papyri consisting of records from the Jewish colony at Elephantine, near the first cataract of the Nile, were discovered between the years 1898 and 1960 (see ELEPHANTINES, PAPYRUSES). These letters dated from the 5th century BC. JC and shed light on the conditions of the Jews of Egypt during Persian times.
As the vernacular of New Testament Palestine, Aramaic was the language of Jesus and of the early church. Although written in Greek, the Gospels contain a number of short Aramaic expressions including: Talitha cumi, ‘child arise’; Efata, a dialectical variant of ithpattach, ‘Be open’; and Eloi, Eloi lama sabactani, a variant of Elahi, Elahi, motto shabactani, “My God, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Source: Archaeological Biblical Dictionary