What languages did the area’s Jews think they were speaking? By the second century B.C.E. Palestinian Jews were writing major religious texts in all three languages, and translating the Hebrew scriptures into both Aramaic and Greek. Strikingly, they did not always even see Hebrew and Aramaic as two different “languages.”Lots of interesting thoughts and nuances here, just as we would expect from Seth. Read it all.
That is, although they formed at least two distinct linguistic systems, they weren’t always differentiated, in theory or practice; the New Testament mentions of “Hebrew” usually refer to what we would call Aramaic, but sometimes Hebrew, and should perhaps be understood as an ethnic term. The more relevant opposition for them may have been ethnic and cultural: not Hebrew vs. Aramaic, but Jewish vs. Greek. It’s this opposition that may have determined how languages were named and categorized in the region as well. The ancient borders of languages, in other words, were themselves linguistically produced.
While this view complicates both scholarly and nationalist presuppositions, it is ultimately a product of them: for linguistic ideologies to be reconstructed, ancient metalanguage—discussions of who was speaking what—must be translated. Indeed, recent decades have seen an explosion in contemporary sources for Aramaic, which strengthens and nuances this picture.
And here is a further scholarly irony. From the purist’s point of view, the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic corpus, which is as close as we are going to come to the Aramaic of Jesus, is as odd as Mel Gibson’s film. Most of this “Aramaic” is not entirely in Aramaic. The inscriptions and Midrash offer Aramaic phrases, sentences, and extended passages—but freely mixed with, or embedded in, Hebrew.
Background here and links.
