In spite of the increasing importance of Greek, the use of Aramaic was also expanding, and it would eventually be dominant among Jews both in the Holy Land and elsewhere in the Middle East around 200 AD[10] and would remain so until the Islamic conquests in the seventh century.
Yadin noticed the shift from Aramaic to Hebrew in the documents he studied, which had been written during the time of the Bar Kokhba revolt.
In his book, Bar Kokhba: The rediscovery of the legendary hero of the last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome, Yigael Yadin notes, "It is interesting that the earlier documents are written in Aramaic while the later ones are in Hebrew.
Possibly the change was made by a special decree of Bar Kokhba who wanted to restore Hebrew as the official language of the state".
But they give him the testimony of being a wise man who is fully acquainted with our laws, and is able to interpret their meaning; on which account, as there have been many who have done their endeavors with great patience to obtain this learning, there have yet hardly been so many as two or three that have succeeded therein, who were immediately well rewarded for their pains.In the first century AD, the Aramaic language was widespread throughout the Middle East, as is supported by the testimony of Josephus's The Jewish War.
[17] Josephus chose to inform people from what are now Iran, Iraq, and remote parts of the Arabian Peninsula about the war of the Jews against the Romans through books he wrote "in the language of our country", prior to translating into Greek for the benefit of the Greeks and Romans: I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country, and sent to the Upper Barbarians; Joseph, the son of Matthias, by birth a Hebrew, a priest also, and one who at first fought against the Romans myself, and was forced to be present at what was done afterwards, [am the author of this work].I thought it therefore an absurd thing to see the truth falsified in affairs of such great consequence, and to take no notice of it; but to suffer those Greeks and Romans that were not in the wars to be ignorant of these things, and to read either flatteries or fictions, while the Parthians, and the Babylonians, and the remotest Arabians, and those of our nation beyond Euphrates, with the Adiabeni, by my means, knew accurately both whence the war begun, what miseries it brought upon us, and after what manner it ended.H.
It had been preceded by a narrative written in Aramaic and addressed to "the barbarians in the interior", who are more precisely defined lower down as the natives of Parthia, Babylonia, and Arabia, the Jewish dispersion in Mesopotamia, and the inhabitants of Adiabene, a principality of which the reigning house, as was proudly remembered, were converts to Judaism (B. i, 3, 6).
Of this Aramaic work the Greek is described as a "version" made for the benefit of the subjects of the Roman Empire, i.e. the Graeco-Roman world at large.
[18] In Acts 1:19, the "Field of Blood" was known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem in their own language as Akeldama, which is the transliteration of the Aramaic words "Haqal Dama".
[23] When the text itself refers to the language of such Semitic glosses, it uses words meaning "Hebrew"/"Jewish" (Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14: têi hebraḯdi dialéktōi, lit.
"This verse gives an Aramaic phrase, attributed to Jesus bringing the girl back to life, with a transliteration into Greek, as ταλιθὰ κούμ.
However, there is evidence[clarification needed] that in speech, the final -ī was dropped so the imperative did not distinguish between masculine and feminine genders.
The older manuscripts, therefore, used a Greek spelling that reflected pronunciation, whereas the addition of an 'ι' was perhaps due to a bookish copyist.
This word was adopted as the official motto of Gallaudet University, the United States' most prominent school for the deaf.
Note, the name Barabbas is a Hellenization of the Aramaic Bar Abba (בר אבא), literally "Son of the Father".
Didache 10:6 (Prayer after Communion) 1 Corinthians 16:22 Depending on how one selects to split the single Greek expression of the early manuscripts into Aramaic, it could be either מרנא תא (marana tha, "Lord, come!")
[36][37] The Biblical Hebrew counterpart to this word, עזב (‘zb) is seen in the second line of the Old Testament's Psalm 22, which the saying appears to quote.
[38] The word used in the Gospel of Mark for "my god", Ἐλωΐ, corresponds to the Aramaic form אלהי, elāhī.
Almost all ancient Greek manuscripts show signs of trying to normalize the two slightly different versions of Jesus's saying, presented in Mark and Matthew.
In Hebrew, the saying would be "אֵלִי אֵלִי, לָמָה עֲזַבְתָּנִי" (ēlī ēlī, lāmā ‘azabtānī in Biblical Hebrew, eli eli lama azavtani in Modern Hebrew pronunciation), while the Syriac-Aramaic phrase according to the Peshitta would be Syriac: ܐܝܠܝ ܐܝܠܝ ܠܡܐ ܫܒܩܬܢܝ, romanized: ʔēl ʔēl lǝmā šǝḇaqtān (Matthew 27:46) or Syriac: ܐܠܗܝ ܐܠܗܝ ܠܡܢܐ ܫܒܩܬܢܝ, romanized: ʾalāh ʾalāh lǝmānā šǝḇaqtān (Mark 15:34).
Matthew 27:6 In Aramaic (קרבנא) it refers to the treasury in the Temple in Jerusalem, derived from the Hebrew Korban (קרבן), found in Mark 7:11 and the Septuagint (in Greek transliteration), meaning religious gift or offering.
It is generally considered to be a quote from Psalms 118:25 "O Lord, save (us)", but the original Biblical Hebrew form was הושיעה נא.
Given the Greek translation provided by the Biblical text ('Sons of Thunder'), it seems that the first element of the name is bnē, 'sons of' (the plural of 'bar'), Aramaic (בני).
Maurice Casey, however, argues that rḡaš is a simple misreading of the word for thunder, rḡam (due to the similarity of Hebrew symbols samech and mem for the Aramaic sounds for s and final m).
[48] In 1990 Bart D. Ehrman wrote an article on the Journal of Biblical Literature, similarly arguing that Peter and Cephas should be understood as different people, citing the writing of Clement of Alexandria[49] and the Epistula Apostolorum and in support of his theory;[50] Ehrman's article received a detailed critique by Dale Allison, who argued that Peter and Cephas are the same person.
Matthew 26:36 Mark 14:32 The place where Jesus takes his disciples to pray before his arrest is given the Greek transliteration Γεθσημανῆ (Gethsēmanē).
The name appears in all of the gospels except Luke, which calls the place simply Kranion (Κρανίον) 'the Skull' in Greek, with no Semitic counterpart.
The Majority Text reads Ἀκελδαμά (Akeldama); other manuscript versions give Ἀχελδαμάχ (Acheldamach), Ἁκελδαμά (Hakeldama), Ἁχελδαμά (Hacheldama) and Ἁκελδαμάχ (Hakeldamach).
While the seemingly gratuitous Greek sound of kh [x] at the end of the word is difficult to explain, the Septuagint similarly adds this sound to the end of the Semitic name Ben Sira to form the Greek name for the Book of Sirakh (Latin: Sirach).
For other Aramaic place names in the New Testament beginning with beth ("house of"), see Bethabara, Bethany, Bethphage and Bethsaida and Bethlehem.