According to the Hebrew book of Deuteronomy, chapter 26, when the
chosen people finally take possession of the Promised Land, they are instructed
to gather up the first fruits of the harvest, present them to the priest and
say: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived
there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, might and
populous” (26:5). This declaration invokes Israel’s nomadic, outcast, and even
refugee[1]
origins in Northern Syria and connects the nation to its founding
father—Abraham, whose very name means “Father of the People” and who, called
from his home in Ur of the Chaldeans (an Aramaic speaking people), forged a
religious legacy claimed by billions of believing Jews, Christians, and Muslims
throughout the globe. These peoples, the “children of Abraham,” share a common
lineage, both ideologically and linguistically, which has its roots deep in
Syrian and Mesopotamian soil, where the Aramaic language was spoken as a
cross cultural common-tongue for millennia.
Unfortunately,
however, the importance of this language and its many dialects goes largely
unnoticed and certainly unappreciated in the general history of the so-called
“Western” religions. For instance, while Hebrew serves as the scriptural
language of the Jewish Bible, nearly all of the ancient Jewish commentaries,
interpretations, and expansions were handed down in Aramaic, not to mention the
massive rabbinic effort to record and codify the “Oral Torah” between the 2nd
and 6th centuries CE, resulting in the much adored and deeply
Aramaic Mishnah and Talmuds. Similarly, the 1st century Christians,
as a Second Temple Jewish sect, would have largely conversed in Palestinian Aramaic,
even though their earliest writings are found only in Greek, with texts in the
Syriac dialect of Aramaic appearing only later. Other branches of the
Judaeo-Christian tree, such as the elusive Mandaeans and universally maligned
Manichaeans both used eastern Aramaic dialects as their primary vehicles of
communication, although for the Manichaeans much like the Christians, this
linguistic substratum has largely been erased. Finally, the early Muslims, the
group that tried to close the book on the Abrahamic legacy are
themselves indebted to the Aramaic speaking milieu in ways that are still not
fully understood.
One
would expect then that Aramaic would be a widely studies and treasured tool in
the modern scholar’s linguistic toolbox. Sadly, it is not. Few scholars of
ancient religion outside of biblical or rabbinic studies bother to acquire this
relatively simple tongue, preoccupied as they are with Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic
as the case may be. Still, underneath the surface of many of their most
treasured texts, be it Torah, New Testament, or Qur’an, can be heard
whisperings and hidden voices from the land of Aram.
[1] Alan
R. Millard, “A Wandering Aramean,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol.
39, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), 153-5.
