All languages
Language
Biblical Aramaic
The lingua franca of the ancient Near East, and the everyday language of Jesus.
- Family
- Northwest Semitic
- Script
- Aramaic square script
- Era
- c. 900 BCE – 200 CE
Character
Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew but grammatically more analytic, with a fuller set of tenses and a definite article suffixed to the noun. It was the administrative language of the Persian Empire and remained the vernacular of Judea into the first century CE.
What it does well
- Precise verbal system with distinct participles and periphrastic tenses.
- Wide diplomatic vocabulary borrowed across empires (Persian, Akkadian, Greek).
- Preserves early legal and administrative idiom used in Ezra and Daniel.
Translation challenges
- Small biblical corpus (parts of Ezra, Daniel, a verse in Jeremiah, two words in Genesis) makes lexicography thin.
- Multiple dialects (Imperial, Palestinian, Syriac) diverge sharply — a word may not mean the same thing across them.
Notes
Targums (Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible) and the Syriac Peshitta are our largest windows into how Aramaic-speaking communities read Scripture.
Documents in Biblical Aramaic
Manuscripts
Versions
No catalogued versions.