"THE PASSION OF ARAMAIC." Well, yeah. The Jerusalem Post has a long, interesting article on the Aramaic language. It opens:

Trying to unravel the mysteries of Aramaic is like embarking on an odyssey across the deserts, mountains and valleys of the Middle East and onwards to Europe and North America.

It is an intellectual adventure that leads to an array of secular scholars, devout clergy and laymen - Jewish and Christian - who are experts in the history of these Semitic languages, which in some places still survive.

They tell of Israeli rock groups that sing modern Aramaic songs, of popular radio and TV programs in Aramaic or Syriac broadcast in Canada, the US and Scandinavia and of remote villages in Syria and Iraq, where Aramaic, rather than Arabic, is the local vernacular.

Regular readers of PaleoJudaica are, of course, already well acquainted with most of this, but even they will find some new facts about Aramaic in this article. It tells of Aramaic-speaking Kurds, Christians in Nazareth who use Aramaic, Syrian villages whose traditional language is Aramaic, the origins and history of the language, Aramaic weddings by Jews in the Caucusus, how Aramaic saved a good bit of ancient Western literature for posterity, and Aramaic popular music.

Then there's this:

Outside of prestigious universities like Cambridge and Tel Aviv University, there are few, if any, schools where Aramaic or Syriac is taught as a language to read, write and speak.

All too true. I am happy to say, however, that at least biblical Aramaic is offered at the University of St. Andrews and I am scheduled to teach it here next year. I keep hoping to offer Syriac some day, but it hasn't happened yet.

On a related note, it is now possible to hear football (soccer) commentary in Aramaic. Really.

UPDATE: The following paragraph from the Jerusalem Post article is attributed to "a Christian scholar based in Jerusalem" who wished to remain anonymous:

The pervasiveness of Aramaic was such that it virtually replaced Hebrew as the preferred language of the Holy Land's Jews, a declining number of whom were familiar with the biblical tongue. This was also true of their coreligionists in Babylon and the surrounding regions of Mesopotamia - so much so, this scholar noted, that the Book of Daniel, which emerged from that milieu, "is more than 80 percent Aramaic."

This requires some correction and nuancing. First, most of chapter 2 and all of chapters 3-7 of Daniel are in Aramaic. That leaves chapters 1, a bit of 2, and 8-12 in Hebrew. I haven't done a verse count, but it's more like a 50-50 split. Second, the book of Daniel was written in the second century B.C.E. (granted, likely incorporating some older legends) and shows important Palestinian Jewish concerns (such as a preoccupation with the Maccabean revolt). In other words the indicators are that it's a Palestinian Jewish book, not a Mesopotamian one. As for the decline of Hebrew, certainly the epigraphic evidence (especially the Bar Kokhba correspondence) indicates that Hebrew was still very much in use as a living language into the second century C.E.

You would think that the Jerusalem Post could have found a biblical scholar somewhere in Jerusalem who was willing to be quoted by name with accurate information on the book of Daniel.