Aramaic by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

ARAMAIC

EERDMANS LANGUAGE RESOURCES

The Eerdmans Language Resources series is a collection of textbooks, readers, reference books, and monographs pertaining to languages commonly used in biblical and theological studies. In these volumes, students and scholars will find indispensable help in understanding and mastering Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and other languages.

Other ELR Titles N. Clayton Croy, A Primer of Biblical Greek S. R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions William L. Holladay, A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament Page H. Kelley and Timothy G. Crawford, Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar, 2nd ed. Page H. Kelley, Terry L. Burden, and Timothy G. Crawford, A Handbook to “Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar,” 2nd ed. William Sanford Lasor, Handbook of Biblical Hebrew

Aramaic A History of the First World Language

Holger Gzella

Translated by Benjamin D. Suchard

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com Original title De eerste wereldtaal: De geschiedenis van het Aramees © 2017 Holger Gzella First published in 2017 by Athenaeum—Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam English translation © 2021 William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. All rights reserved Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7748-2

This book was published with the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Leiden University Fund / Fonds Van Trigt, and the Stichting Studiecentrum voor Judaïca en Hebraïca Dr L. Fuks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gzella, Holger, 1974– author. | Suchard, Benjamin D., translator. Title: Aramaic : a history of the first world language / Holger Gzella ; translated by Benjamin D. Suchard. Other titles: Eerste wereldtaal. English. Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2021. | “Original title De eerste wereldtaal: De geschiedenis van het Aramees, © 2017 Holger Gzella. First published in 2017 by Athenaeum—Polak & Van Gennep, Amsterdam.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A comprehensive history of the Aramaic language, from its first attestations around 1000 BCE to the modern day”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052275 | ISBN 9780802877482 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Aramaic language—History. Classification: LCC PJ5201 G9413 2021 | DDC 492/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052275

Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations and Symbols

Introduction

The Importance of Aramaic

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar

The Evolution of Aramaic and Its Periodization

Overview of This Book and a Guide to Further Study

The Oldest Aramaic and Its Cultural Context

The Origin of Aramaic and the Linguistic Context of Syria-Palestine

A New Writing Culture: The Alphabet’s Big Break

Speaking through Stone: The Context of the Old Aramaic Inscriptions

The Arameans and Their Southern Neighbors: Aramaic Writing Culture in Palestine

Aramaic on the Move

Aramaic as a World Language

Aramaic in Its Imperial Context

Aramaic as the New Administrative Language of the Assyrian Empire

Continuity in the Babylonian Period

Codification and Maximal Extent in the Achaemenid Period

The Imperial Aramaic Writing Tradition

103

Contents 4.

Aramaic in the Bible and Early Judaism

106

Aramaic’s Integration in Palestine

106

The Hebrew Bible and Aramaic

113

Aramaic Books of the Bible and Their Background

118

The Aramaic Literary Tradition of Palestine and the Dead Sea Scrolls

134

Aramaic as the Language of Jesus and the Background of the New Testament

144

Aramaic between the Classical and Parthian Worlds

151

A Network of Local Aramaic Written Languages

151

Palmyra and the Palmyrenes between East and West

165

In the Shadow of the Parthian Empire: Hatra, Eastern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia

172

Dura Europos: Aramaic in a Greek Administrative Context

179

The Arsacid Aramaic Writing Culture of the Parthians

182

Syriac and the End of Paganism

187

Syriac Christianity and Its Cultural Context in Late Antiquity

187

Edessa, the Cradle of Syriac

197

The Rise of Christian Syriac Literature in Edessa and Beyond

203

Syriac as an International Ecclesiastical Language

213

Syriac’s Lasting Legacy

221

7. The Second Sacred Language: Aramaic in Rabbinic Judaism

226

Hebrew and Aramaic in Jewish Textual Culture

226

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic

234

Jewish Babylonian Aramaic

243

Aramaic Bible Translations between Palestine and Babylonia

250

Between the Local and the Sacred: Judaism’s Aramaic Legacy

258

Contents 8.

10.

Not Just Jews and Christians: Samaritans, Mandeans, and Others

263

Aramaic and the Religions of Late Antiquity

263

Preaching to the Peasants: Christian Palestinian Aramaic

269

Other Israelites: The Samaritans and Samaritan Aramaic

275

Mythology and Mystery: The Mandeans in Babylonia

281

In the Shadow of Orthodoxy: Aramaic Magic Texts and Folk Religion

288

Aramaic in Arabia and the Islamic World

294

Aramaic and the Languages of the Arabian Peninsula

294

The Nabateans and Aramaic as an Official Language in Arabia

301

Aramaic and the Emancipation of Arabic as a Written Language

309

The Spread of Arabic as the Language of Islam

316

The Aramaic Legacy in Modern Arabic

318

Modern Aramaic from a Historical Perspective

322

Aramaic as a Modern Minority Language

322

The Long History of the Aramaic Dialects

328

Diversity within Neo-Aramaic

331

New Aramaic Written Languages

333

From Aram to Zakho: Three Thousand Years of Aramaic

337

Essential Bibliography

343

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

345

Index

349

vii

Preface

The existence of this book is as unexpected as Aramaic’s ascent to a world language. Quite untypically for a scholarly monograph, it was originally published in Dutch under the title De eerste wereldtaal: De geschiedenis van het Aramees in 2017, and in its second printing in 2019, but a surprising amount of media coverage prompted author and publisher to explore the feasibility of an English edition. Eerdmans was an obvious choice given the subject matter, the pleasant collaboration on the English version of the same author’s Aramaic volume in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, and the roots of the company in the Netherlands. I am very grateful to Anita Eerdmans for welcoming this project right from the outset and to the editors involved at various stages for seeing it through with characteristic thoroughness. Dr. Benjamin D. Suchard was the ideal translator; the text is as faithful to the original as it can be, while the many explanations specifically geared toward a Dutch-speaking audience have been efficiently localized. Substantial grants from the Dutch Foundation for Literature, the Leiden University Fund/Fonds Van Trigt, and the Stichting Studiecentrum voor Judaïca en Hebraïca Dr L. Fuks made the work possible in the end. The purpose remains unchanged: to free Aramaic from an ancillary role in the shadow of the Hebrew Bible and to unveil its contribution to the formation and exchange of ideas, customs, and traditions in the entire Near East. Being the primary medium of law, administration, and religious literature between the period of the ancient world empires and the rise of Islam, Aramaic united peoples and cultural groups of diverse origins and left them a lasting heritage. Owing to its fragmentation across different academic fields, however, the unifying force that consists in its linguistic history often remains opaque; the present book envisages to trace the continuity of Aramaic through shifting political and social conditions. As I still “read, much of the night,” the upcoming English edition provided a timely opportunity to incorporate a number of bibliographic updates and

Preface several other minor improvements. During the process, I went “south in winter” and am especially grateful to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Faculty of Catholic Theology for creating a work environment that is as pleasant, inspiring, and hospitable as one could possibly imagine. Holger Gzella Munich, on the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola 2020

Abbreviations and Symbols

CHA COS

DJD H

KAI

PAT

TAD

TDOT 16

Syriac inscriptions in Han J. W. Drijvers and John F. Healey. The Old Syriac Inscriptions of Edessa and Osrhoene: Texts, Translations, and Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 1999 (cited according to number). A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam. Holger Gzella. Leiden: Brill, 2015. The Context of Scripture. Edited by William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1997–2018 (cited according to volume and page). Discoveries in the Judean Desert. Oxford: Clarendon, 1955–2010 (cited by volume editor and number, not volume title). Inscriptions from Hatra in Klaus Beyer. Die aramäischen Inschriften aus Assur, Hatra und dem übrigen Ostmesopotamien (datiert 44 v. Chr. bis 238 n. Chr.). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998 (cited according to number). Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften. Edited by Herbert Donner and Wolfgang Röllig. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrasso witz, 1966–2002 (cited according to the number of the relevant inscription). Palmyrene Aramaic Texts. Delbert R. Hillers and Eleonora Cussini. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 (cited according to the number of the relevant inscription). Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni. 4 vols. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Department of the History of the Jewish People, 1986–1999 (cited according to volume A–D followed by the number of the relevant text). Holger Gzella, ed. Aramaic Dictionary. Vol. 16 of Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Edited by Heinz-Josef Fabry. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018.

Abbreviations and Symbols [ ]

Text of a quote is only fragmentarily preserved and has been supplemented.

The symbols for Aramaic sounds and letters are explained in chapter 1; familiar personal names and place-names often occur in simplified transliteration.

xii

1 Introduction

The Importance of Aramaic Aramaic is everywhere. This conclusion is inescapable to any student of the rich history of Hebrew’s once domineering sister language, now well known only to specialists. The name, at least, is familiar to many people. Aramaic forms part of the Western literary canon, since sections of the Bible were written in it. These include the court stories from the book of Daniel, chapters 2–7, which inspired generations of writers, painters, and composers. Jesus, too, almost certainly spoke in Aramaic when he formulated the Lord’s Prayer and the parables that are preserved in the New Testament. In popular culture, Aramaic figures as the language of hoary wisdom texts or a means to communicate with spirits and demons. In everyday life, we encounter the endless varieties of Aramaic in many ways. The well-known expression “feet of clay” comes from the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about a strong-looking but ultimately vulnerable colossus in Daniel 2; its feet of clay are its Achilles’s heel. Rembrandt’s famous painting Belshazzar’s Feast depicts “the writing on the wall” of Daniel 5, a prophecy of doom written in fiery Aramaic letters. Walk into any Indian restaurant and you can have your pick of tandoori dishes, a name that derives from Aramaic tannur “oven,” brought to South Asia by the Persian Empire. The Kaddish, one of the most important Jewish prayers—put to music by Ravel—is written in Aramaic. The New Testament’s talitha kum, Aramaic for “arise, girl,” was left unchanged in the Greek text of Mark 5:41 as a ritual phrase and still appears that way in English translations. In recent years we have heard much about the destruction of ancient statues from Palmyra, which often bear Aramaic inscriptions. Movies like The Exorcist or The Passion of the Christ occasionally or even mainly show characters speaking broken Ar1

Introduction amaic. Cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago, and Detroit are home to large Aramaic-speaking communities; you might also overhear people chatting in an Aramaic dialect while waiting for the London Tube or on a Toronto subway car. And so it goes on and on. These are the gravitational waves of a culture with an ancient history, starting around 1000 BCE, reaching the present. The Jewish and Christian scriptures were canonized in an Aramaic-speaking world and largely shaped by it, affecting the pronunciation of Modern Hebrew to this day, as was the Qur’an, which contains a number of Aramaic loanwords. The empires of the ancient Near East, which at a certain point even reached Afghanistan and Pakistan, were administered in Aramaic. Aramaic has formed an inextricable part of Jewish textual culture up to the present day. At the same time, it forms the foundations of the native Christian tradition of the Middle East. Even the “Hebrew” letter shapes, also known as square script, and the Arabic alphabet have their origins in Aramaic writing systems. Especially due to its importance for biblical studies, Aramaic has been present at Western universities in some shape or another since the Early Modern period. It is still in active use by minorities who left their homeland in search of a better life, ending up in North America, Australia, or Europe. Despite the best efforts of those in power from antiquity onward—including university administrators—Aramaic continues to survive. This history makes Aramaic a strong binding agent connecting the ancient Near East and the modern Middle East, despite all the social, political, and cultural changes this region has undergone through the ages. Its historical reception illustrates two of the West’s main associations with the Middle East: ancient civilizations and modern conflicts. Aramaic also forms the shared backdrop of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and smaller but still vital religions like those of the Samaritans and the Mandeans. It is not an exaggeration to state that Aramaic was the most important Middle Eastern language between the age of the ancient world empires and the coming of Islam. The question of why this language in particular has proven to be so resilient is rooted in three thousand years of history; trying to answer it opens up a fascinating field of research. On account of its complexity and its fragmentation over a host of academic disciplines, however, an accessible yet scientifically grounded overview of the cultural history of Aramaic is lacking. This book aims to change that—to systematically reveal the relationships between the different kinds of Aramaic and to illustrate their cultural impact. So, what is Aramaic? The name, which was already in use in antiquity, is derived from the place-name Aram, which originally roughly coincided 2

The Importance of Aramaic with the area of the Syrian Desert. The original meaning of the word remains unknown; according to Genesis 10:22, the ancestor of the Arameans bore the same name, but this is probably a later tradition. As an adjective used to refer to the Aramaic language and script, the word is first attested around 500 BCE.1 From a modern historical-linguistic point of view, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic language family, together with Hebrew, Arabic, and several other languages formerly and sometimes still spoken from Ethiopia to Mesopotamia (although none can boast of a longer continuous history than Aramaic). Within this family, it belongs to the subgroup that is now normally referred to as Northwest Semitic.2 This relationship is easy to spot, even to the untrained eye, just as one can often clearly see the resemblance between different family members without being able to define exactly what they have in common—the human brain is often quite good at quickly recognizing patterns. Medieval Jewish grammarians noticed the parallels between Aramaic malk, Hebrew melekh, and Arabic malik. These words all mean “king” and apparently all derive from the same Semitic proto-form, just as English king, German König, and Dutch koning all developed from the same older Germanic word. Explaining what exactly this relatedness entails and how it works in detail is slightly more complicated. Drawing a family tree of languages presupposes a shared historical background, just like a biological family tree of a group of plant or animal species. Moreover, it implies that once a certain group of speakers broke away from a formerly unified population, the languages generally developed independently. This model is based on systematic, significant correspondences between sounds, in the first place, and consequently between grammatical forms and words. (Since there are infinitely more words than basic sounds in any language, it also occurs that some words that are historically completely unrelated happen to sound similar. Of course, we cannot draw any historical conclusions from such coincidences.) Mutual contact between speakers due to geographical proximity or social interactions can slowly reintroduce shared developments to the individual languages, making it difficult to say whether some parallels were inherited from a common ancestor, were borrowed from one language to the other at a later point in time, or resulted from parallel innovation.3 1. See the concise overview in Holger Gzella, “‘m,” TDOT 16:581–86, esp. 585–86. 2. For the classification of Aramaic within the Semitic languages, see also CHA, 16–22. 3. A concise but clear explanation of this model and its application to the Semitic languages can be found in John Huehnergard and Aaron D. Rubin, “Phyla and Waves: Models of Classification of the Semitic Languages,” in The Semitic Languages: An International

Introduction Thus, only systematic and nontrivial resemblances and differences allow us to rationally define languages, differentiate them from one other, and investigate their relationships (an endeavor known as classification) and eventually to make them the subject of a dedicated scholarly discipline. This also holds for Aramaic: despite the great diversity that resulted from its long and decentralized history, its unified beginnings are reflected in certain characteristic words and grammatical phenomena that recur in every Aramaic language. That is why we can speak about Aramaic as one entity. The concept is primarily a linguistic one and does not imply any coherent ethnic or sociocultural existence of one homogeneous Aramaic people. The latter does play a certain role as a nostalgic ideal in the identity construction of modern Aramaic speakers, and in certain periods, “Aramaic” was also used in the general sense of “pagan.” But those meanings are secondary.4 This overarching concept of Aramaic, strictly a historical-linguistic abstraction, is made more concrete by various terms for the various Aramaic languages (or dialects, where we are mainly dealing with regional vernaculars without a written tradition; the neutral term variety includes both categories). Some of these are clear and unambiguous, such as “Syriac” for the literary standard language of Syriac Christianity or “Biblical Aramaic” for the Aramaic portions of the Old Testament. Others, on the other hand, are ambiguous, such as “Jewish Aramaic,” which actually covers language varieties that are historically and regionally very different. (Jewish Aramaic was formerly also known as “Chaldean,” as Daniel 2:4 depicts the Chaldeans, the sages and oracle priests at the Babylonian court, as speaking Aramaic, and the Aramaic of the book of Daniel reached us in the same script as the other Jewish Aramaic written languages.) Or scholars use the same terms to refer to different historical periods, as with “Old Aramaic” or “Imperial Aramaic.” Others still are just misleading, such as “Modern Syriac” for the modern spoken languages, which do not directly descend from Syriac. When discussing what a certain word or phrase is “in Aramaic,” then, we always have to specify which period, region, or culture is meant, unlike Classical Latin, for instance. Unlike Hebrew and Arabic studies—fields that originally also focused on the study of language but increasingly came to be overshadowed by their offspring, Old Testament exegesis and Islamic studies, as the twentieth century Handbook, ed. Stefan Weninger et al. (Berlin, 2011), 259–78. More detailed information is found in the general introductions to historical linguistics, such as Robert McColl Millar, Trask’s Historical Linguistics, 3rd ed. (London, 2015). 4. See also Jean Maurice Fiey, “‘Assyriens’ ou ‘Araméens’?,” L’Orient Syrien 10 (1965): 141–60.

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies progressed—there was no separate academic tradition of Aramaic studies. This is immediately reflected in the aforementioned terminological heterogeneity and the lack of other fixed standards such as agreed-upon systems of Romanization. Such diversity in the discourse about Aramaic is due to both the great internal variety of Aramaic, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fact that the individual language varieties did not develop in the context of one continuous Aramaic culture or civilization that could sensibly form the subject of its own academic discipline. Hence, their internal coherence is much less obvious and only appears from a historical point of view. Accordingly, Aramaic is hardly ever studied for its own sake (although I hope to show here how rewarding such a study can be), but only for practical purposes: as a tool to render textual sources accessible to further inquiry. These sources, though, are essential to research in the fields of biblical studies, Jewish studies, the study of Eastern Christianity, the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, minorities in the modern Middle East, the early history of Islam, and, increasingly, general linguistics (roughly in that order, historically speaking). For the most part, Aramaic is thus studied as a crucial but subservient element in several well-established, mainly philological and historical disciplines and social sciences. Even in the academic world, only few people see any inherent value that transcends the disciplinary boundaries in this language family. But any responsible use of a language, be it a language course, a practical grammar, or a translation, must be grounded in fundamental, not merely utilitarian, research. Only the latter aims to uncover the deepest workings of the grammatical system, what the words in texts from a certain period really mean, and which historical circumstances influenced the language’s development.

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies For the reasons mentioned above, the study of Aramaic did not result in a completely separate set of academic institutions, with its own research units, chairs, conferences, and study programs. The history of Aramaic studies has therefore always been interwoven with the broader context:5 the historical tra5. Summarized in CHA, 3–16. A great deal of valuable material on the history of the research into the individual Aramaic language and text traditions including rich bibliographical references can now be found in Edward Lipiński, Semitic Linguistics in Historical Perspective (Louvain, 2014), 37–288.

Introduction dition of “oriental philology,” with a clear focus on the original languages of the Bible; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ mainly secular, empirical study of Semitic languages and literatures; and now the increasingly interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world, sociologically influenced religious studies, and descriptive linguistics. The language’s dispersion over quite varied political entities and religiocultural groups is thus remarkably paralleled by the institutional embedding of the field in different academic disciplines. Perhaps it is precisely this flexibility that has allowed Aramaic to maintain its position, albeit at a small scale, in universities’ study and research programs in times of far-reaching reorganizations. As Aramaic can easily be integrated into completely different frameworks, it is basically immune to the irrational likes and dislikes, the bizarre flowchart aesthetics and managerial groupthink that motivate so many decisions at today’s academic institutions. History shows that every university can profit from one or two people with a command of a few Aramaic languages. The discovery of dozens of Aramaic manuscripts at Qumran revolutionized biblical studies and the history of Judaism some seventy years ago, and the use of Aramaic as a world language makes it an important contributor to the current fascination for ancient world empires. While Jewish scholars never stopped studying Aramaic texts since antiquity and Syriac Christendom even developed a native grammatical tradition, academic Aramaic studies in the West originated in the sixteenth century’s renewed interest in the text of the Bible in its original languages. The Reformers’ primary aim was to regain access to the foundation of the Christian faith, the Holy Writ. In order to do so, it was essential to understand what the texts really said and, in the Reformers’ view, to break free from the Latin Bible translation (the Vulgate) and the buildup of ecclesiastical traditions that the Catholic Church saw as normative and another source of revelation—an impossible goal, as it turned out, since knowledge of an extinct language stems from tradition itself. In those days, Aramaic was mainly known from the biblical passages in Ezra and Daniel; Syriac and the different Aramaic languages of Jewish traditional literature initially received less attention. As a part of the original text of the biblical canon, Aramaic was, to a small degree, the language of inspired revelation, alongside (and overshadowed by) Hebrew for the rest of the Old Testament and Greek for the New. Old translations into Aramaic such as the Syriac Christian Bible and the Jewish targums also afforded a better understanding of difficult Hebrew concepts and expressions. A relatively high number of Hebrew words only occur once in the whole Bible, without their meaning being clear from context. Also, some passages are hard to understand, especially poetic texts, sometimes due to copying 6

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies errors that arose during the centuries-long transmission process. Because the old translations are much closer to the original text than the medieval biblical manuscripts and the early printed editions that were based on them, they often contain indirect clues to the correct interpretation, and not just as regards the presumed original meaning of a word. Sometimes also the translator correctly rendered an expression from the still uncorrupted original text, while copyists introduced mistakes into the expression that would be perpetuated in later manuscripts by other copyists. The closer to the original texts, the better. This approach was called philologia sacra and reached its zenith in the great “polyglot Bibles” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: multilingual editions whose stately folios combined the Hebrew text with Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and even Arabic translations.6 To those not involved in the Reformation, Syriac was particularly important as it allowed them to gain more familiarity with Eastern traditions of Christianity and, where possible, work toward unification with the Catholic Church. The Eastern churches clearly had more in common with the Catholics, as far as doctrine (especially the sacraments) and religious practice (such as the importance of fast and feast days or the veneration of Mary and other saints) were concerned, than the Protestants. Accordingly, it was already noted during the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1437–1449) that the lack of capable translators was hampering theological discourse. Middle Eastern priests and scholars subsequently made their way to Europe, mostly Italy (where specialized seminaries sprang up), enriched the libraries with new manuscripts, and passed on their knowledge.7 In this way, basic handbooks like grammars, lexicons, chrestomathies, and comparative lists of morphological phenomena and words in the Semitic languages formed the necessary philological tools to integrate the study of the Aramaic biblical passages, targums, and Syriac into teaching practice and thereby 6. The history of Early Modern Bible studies is a specialization of its own, with an extensive secondary literature; an overview can be found in Stephen G. Burnett, “Later Christian Hebraists,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Sæbø (Göttingen, 1998), 2:785–801, and Stephen G. Burnett, Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning (Leiden, 2012); Giuliano Tamani, “Gli studi di aramaico giudaico nel sec. XVI,” in Italia ed Europa nella linguistica del Rinascimento: Confronti e relazioni; Atti del convegno internazionale (Ferrara, Istituto di studi rinascimentali, 20–24 marzo 1991), ed. Mirko Tavoni (Modena, 1996), 2:503–15. 7. See Werner Strothmann, Die Anfänge der syrischen Studien in Europa (Göttingen, 1971), and Riccardo Contini, “Gli inizi della linguistica siriaca nell’Europa rinascimentale,” Rivista di Studi Orientali 68 (1994): 15–30.

Introduction to employ Aramaic for a deeper understanding of Scripture. At the same time, the need for suitable fonts stimulated technological advances in printing. Santes Pagnino (1470–1541), the author of the first printed Aramaic lexicon, Elias Levita (1469–1549), and Johann Buxtorf (father and son, 1564–1629 and 1599–1664, respectively) are still revered among aficionados of printing history, and before the introduction of the euro, anyone handling a one-hundred-mark note in Germany would come face to face with Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), another leading Aramaic grammarian and lexicographer. Anyone who was anyone in the scholarly worlds of those days, whether they were Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, had spent at least some time acquainting themselves with Aramaic. Important centers of Aramaic studies were the Reformation strongholds of Heidelberg, Basel, and, from 1575 onward, Leiden, but the great mobility that was already characteristic of scholars in this period permitted new insights to spread quickly through Europe, crossing geographical and confessional borders. The shared use of Latin as a scientific language, similar university curricula, compatible scientific values and ideals, and relationships that were strengthened through regular correspondence allowed ideas to resonate throughout the international scholarly community. The earliest beginnings of Semitic philology in Early Modern Europe are characterized by the playful virtuosity of learned litterati: scholars were burning with enthusiasm, drank in all the new knowledge they could hold, diligently spread the word of new discoveries throughout the continent, and even tried to gain some active proficiency in the language. The still primarily practical interest in Aramaic lived on in the eighteenth century. At the same time, new Aramaic languages became known, although they were not yet systematically studied. In this period, for instance, missionaries in Iraq first encountered Mandean religious communities and brought manuscripts of Mandaic scriptures back to Europe. One especially important breakthrough was the decipherment of the Palmyrene Aramaic script by Jean- Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795; see chapter 5); this was the first ancient script to be deciphered in modern times, decades before Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to establish the correct readings of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Barthélemy’s discovery would also enable scholars to decipher the Phoenician alphabet and to read the older Aramaic inscriptions in this alphabet that were steadily appearing in European collections, brought back by travelers to the Middle East. Consequently, the subdivision of Aramaic suddenly became much more complicated than its old split into a Jewish and a Christian branch. In the course of the nineteenth century, the study of inscriptions, in particular, in various Semitic languages led to a more precise historical framework of 8

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies the entire ancient Near East.8 As it happens, Aramaic literary traditions such as Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, and Jewish biblical translations and commentaries in Aramaic, to which older investigations were limited, had been transmitted in manuscripts over a period of many centuries, just like Biblical Hebrew or the Arabic of the Qur’an, for example. Generations of copyists intentionally or unintentionally introduced changes of some degree to the texts, making it nearly impossible to recover the authentic form of the text without external points of comparison. All kinds of things could happen: replacing old-fashioned words with their modern counterparts, smoothing out phrases that were considered improper or blasphemous, or just inadvertent mistakes. Inscriptions, on the other hand, are unchangeable snapshots of the time in which they were produced. By studying them, we can establish reliable criteria that not only distinguish individual forms that are original to the Aramaic in which a text was composed from secondary forms in the later manuscripts, but, when taken together, also more clearly show the language itself in its original garb. These inscriptions also contain much historical information about Aramaic-speaking and other cultures of the first millennium BCE for which we do not possess any other primary sources. The nineteenth century also saw the rise of secular study of the Semitic languages, influenced by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Admittedly, this was still closely linked to the study of the Bible conducted at the flourishing Protestant faculties of theology; a major percentage of academics of the period were ministers, a universally respected and attractive profession. But grammarians and lexicographers were increasingly focusing on the individual Semitic languages and literatures in their own right instead of the traditional philologia sacra. These nonclerical philologists were less interested in increasing their understanding of divine revelation than in reaching a linguistically and historically adequate analysis of difficult texts. Many of them primarily saw solving philological puzzles as an intellectual and cultural achievement. From 1850 onward, this new school of professional scholars built their own habitat, an established infrastructure of academic chairs, scholarly journals, and learned societies. Based on the family tree model sketched above, the Semitic language family was defined in a historically valid manner; from this point of view, Hebrew was just a normal language, the biblical text a historical artifact. Naturally, Aramaic followed in step with this professionalized discipline of Semitics. 8. See Holger Gzella, “Expansion of the Linguistic Context of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: Hebrew among the Languages of the Ancient Near East,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 3.1:134–67.

Introduction Knowledge of all kinds of Semitic languages was further improved thanks to great numbers of new, mostly Syriac and Arabic manuscripts brought to Europe by travelers—not always honorably acquired—and inscriptions and archaeological finds resulting from large-scale excavations. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, modern dialects of Arabic and Aramaic also entered the scope of scientific inquiry, which had traditionally been more concerned with classical, literary languages. After the decipherment of cuneiform, which was completed in 1857, the following decades saw scholars finally able to study the great civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia based on their own testimony. This fed into the idea that had already started to develop in the eighteenth century that the biblical texts are products of human history and culture, sometimes leading to the extreme view that the whole lot came from Mesopotamia. With its strong emphasis on grammar, Semitic philology formed a safe space for people looking for intellectual solid ground, unable to bridge the gap between confessional loyalty and scholarly integrity in an age of exploding knowledge and eroding certainties.9 That is why, for instance, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), one of the founding fathers of the approach that places the Law of Moses not at the beginning of ancient Israelite religious history but rather toward its end, exchanged his chair in Old Testament exegesis for a position in Semitic languages. Its roots in the Reformation, high density of state universities (in which the theological faculties were firmly entrenched), and well-developed academic culture made the Protestant part of Germany the standard-bearer of the comparative study of Semitic—and therefore also Aramaic—grammar and lexicon. The old chestnut still has it that the most important Semitic language is German (with good reason!). Many of the leading North American Semitic philologists in those days, such as Richard Gottheil or James Montgomery, pursued graduate studies in Germany. In England and the Netherlands, scholars were more occupied with editions of especially Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, which the big libraries possessed in large numbers. French academics also published many inscriptions, many of which are still housed in the Louvre thanks to the work of French archaeologists. The study of Islam was additionally motivated by colonial interests. By now, the differences in the re9. Several examples (especially Gustav Bickell, Mark Lidzbarski, Hans Bauer, and Jakob Barth) are discussed based on autobiographical material in Holger Gzella, “The Prussian Professor as a Paradigm: Trying to ‘Fit In’ as a Semitist between 1870 and 1930,” in Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, ed. Herman J. Paul and Christiaan A. Engberts (Leiden, 2019), 17–44.

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies search profile of each country had become more pronounced than in the Early Modern period. The large amount of new material and the dominance of a historical, positivist approach similarly formed the background of the first systematic attempts to chart the diversity of Aramaic and correctly trace the development of the individual Aramaic languages. The leading figure in this regard was Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), a prototypical secular Semitist and self-proclaimed rationalist who, as he wrote on many occasions in his hundreds of letters, wished to understand the mysteries of the language in a strictly empirical fashion Theodor Nöldeke. (From the family archive and harbored a lifelong distaste for of Rudolf Smend.) religious literature.10 (Exposure to Syriac theology had the completely opposite effect on some others. After receiving his doctorate, Nöldeke’s contemporary Gustav Bickell fell under the spell of the fourth-century CE hymns of Ephrem, which convinced him of the historical continuity of Christian tradition. He converted to Catholicism and became a priest!) Especially Nöldeke’s extremely accurate grammars of Syriac and Mandaic are still standard reference works. At the same time, his more specialized articles definitively abolished the earlier, too naïve division of Aramaic into a Jewish and a Christian branch, replacing it with a linguistic subclassification into historical phases and regional dialect clusters. In this period, the description of Semitic languages was further influenced by the conceptual categories of Greek and Latin grammar and came to be further incorporated into Western grammatical paradigms. To sum up, nineteenth-century biblical studies and Semitic linguistics were marked by an enormous expansion of the fields’ breadth, by methodologi10. For a selection of his letters (unfortunately often abridged) and a biographical sketch, see Bernhard Maier, Gründerzeit der Orientalistik: Theodor Nöldekes Leben und Werk im Spiegel seiner Briefe (Würzburg, 2013).

Introduction cal refinement, and by an increasingly worldly, secular, and empirical atmosphere that led to a clear increase in status of the study of grammar for its own sake. Research was centered on the interpretation of important, exemplary sources from different periods and the conclusive discussion of questions of linguistic and cultural history. Deepening expertise, based on a shared canon of literary languages and texts, and the involvement of other, previously less thoroughly investigated dialects led to the creation of a new specialization. Scholars mainly showed appreciation for a high level of craftsmanship and ongoing high-quality output; one’s personal affinity for the subject was only of secondary importance. In the twentieth century, these trends continued as far as methodology and research topics are concerned. The most radical new discoveries and discussions in the field of Aramaic, however, mainly concern the oldest period;11 its testimony had previously been limited to a handful of Aramaic epigraphic texts. Fresh Old Aramaic inscriptions and tablets from the earliest period turned up in one dig after the other until well into the 1890s. Additionally, German archaeologists discovered dozens of Imperial Aramaic papyri on the Egyptian island of Elephantine soon after the beginning of the twentieth century. These now attest the historically most important Aramaic writing tradition, the one that eventually elevated Aramaic to the status of world language and that also includes the Aramaic of the Bible. The tireless empiricist Mark Lidzbarski (1868–1928), who left his Orthodox Jewish upbringing in Poland behind as a teenager with the explicit purpose of becoming a Prussian professor, crucially contributed to the consolidation of Aramaic epigraphy (and also of Mandaic).12 The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956 and dating to the third century BCE through the second century CE, not only turned the history of the Bible on its head but also contained a wealth of original Aramaic compositions. These shine a completely new light on the intellectual background of the New Testament and its setting in the context of Palestinian Judaism.13 11. The scholarship up until the Second World War is extensively discussed in Franz Rosenthal, Die aramaistische Forschung seit Th. Nöldeke’s Veröffentlichungen (Leiden, 1939); a sketch of the further developments is given by Steven E. Fassberg, “The Linguistic Context of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic in the Framework of Semitic Philology, Including Semitic Epigraphy,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, 3.2:45–57. 12. For the earliest history of Semitic epigraphy, see Mark Lidzbarski, Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik nebst ausgewählten Inschriften (Weimar, 1898), 1:89–110, now to be supplemented with Lipiński, Semitic Linguistics in Historical Perspective, 89–153. 13. The history of research is discussed from different viewpoints (usually focusing on

A Brief History of Aramaic Studies In a far-reaching attempt to contextualize the Aramaic texts of Qumran and elsewhere in the Dead Sea region, the branching of Aramaic and the historical evolution of Aramaic grammar in the premodern period were systematically unpacked for the first time by the astute Klaus Beyer (1929–2014). Supplementary material appeared in the shape of all kinds of new Aramaic inscriptions from all over the Roman Near East. Publications, however, were still geared toward specialists. Text editions were accompanied by grammar sketches and glossaries according to the established nineteenth-century tradition. In the second half of the twentieth century, collections of annotated (but not always reliable) translations into several European languages were published for the benefit of theologians, who due to strongly revised university curricula no longer possessed the intimate knowledge of the source languages that characterized earlier generations. The contextualization of the Old and partially of the New Testament as hailing from the ancient Near East did continue to play a large role within biblical exegesis. The more copious Aramaic literary languages, however, received less attention than in the nineteenth century. Especially the discovery of the first complete manuscript of a late Palestinian targum of the Pentateuch, the famous Codex Neofiti, copied in 1504 and discovered in the Vatican Library in 1956, gave this discipline a breath of fresh air, both in terms of a renewed stream of publications of all kinds of older targum fragments and the stimulation of further reflection on conceptual questions like the relationship between translation and interpretation. But the study of the other great Jewish Aramaic corpora, especially the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmud, remained confined to traditional Jewish education and was largely isolated from the historical-linguistic field of Aramaic studies. Since the nineteenth century, the consolidation of Old Testament exegesis and the flourishing of Syriac and Arabic studies had caused a sharp decrease in interest in the Jewish varieties of Aramaic. Only in recent years have scholars tried to relate these texts to the larger historical evolution of Aramaic as well. Syriac was much more prominent in teaching and research at Western universities, but the knowledge of grammar and vocabulary stagnated. The emphasis lay and still lies with Syriac theological and literary history and its interaction with other Eastern Christian traditions; one of the best-known practitioners is Sebastian Brock (1938–). Because of the functional purpose of language in that regard and the high quality of the existing grammars and dicregional traditions) in Devorah Dimant, ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research (Leiden, 2012).

Introduction tionaries, the demand for radically new aids for the study of Syriac is small. The existence of uncontested standard reference works in which every linguistic question apparently finds its tailor-made answer inevitably discourages innovation, as in the fields of Biblical Hebrew or Classical Arabic linguistics. The biggest methodological enrichment for the study of Aramaic in the twentieth century was the professionalization of the research into the modern dialects. Instead of the still strongly philologically oriented approach of the scholars who founded this subfield around 1900, the modern discipline makes use of insights gained from the description of countless other “exotic” languages from far-flung locations like South America, Africa, or East Asia. The vast increase of available data does a far better job, compared to the classical grammatical tradition, of showing how the language really works, how variable its pronunciation can be, and how certain cognitive categories are reflected in different linguistic structures. Especially over the past decades, more and more “endangered” Aramaic dialects have been described, especially by Otto Jastrow (1942–), Geoffrey Khan (1958–), and their students. This has also resulted in the collection of admirable amounts of important ethnographic material on Middle Eastern minorities and their ways of life. Persecution and assimilation are causing many of the last surviving branches of this culturally so important language to disappear; under this time pressure, much of this work focuses on quickly gaining an essential overview, for now. The culture of the field is different, too: while the older phases of the language are mainly the domain of armchair philologists, with their appetite for the minute details of grammars and texts (Nöldeke never visited the Middle East), the dialectologists are mainly concerned with thorough linguistic analysis of the systems and structures underlying the linguistic data that are collected by conducting fieldwork with living speakers. Of course, in the future this may well provide interesting insights into the fragmentarily documented premodern varieties of Aramaic. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the high level of disciplinary specialization that characterized the twentieth century has started to decrease again. Areas of expertise in which Aramaic still has a large role to play are incorporated in broader, culturally framed projects, and stable boundaries between disciplines are steadily being replaced by fluid “paradigms.” These aim less at the thorough familiarity with individual languages and texts and more at the bigger conceptual questions, which are then answered from comparative perspectives in conference talks that may or may not be published. The same tendency has seen the importance of the context of the Old Testament in the Near East, which used to dominate the field of theology, fade away under the influence of every literary or cultural theoretical reading of the Bible imagin14

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar able. State-of-the-art approaches along these lines that have some interesting contributions to make include studies on particular themes in Aramaic apocalyptic texts from Qumran or Syriac exegetical works, the influence of Greco- Roman globalization on Near Eastern cultures, or the function of language as a marker of religious identity. Advances in general linguistics, too, have increasingly inspired research into the older forms of Aramaic, especially in the realm of syntax. Additionally, Aramaic’s long documented history, great internal complexity, and use in multilingual settings make it an important contributor to the development of theoretical linguistics. These last two tendencies are very promising: in the twenty-first century, the disciplines of history and linguistics will provide the main infrastructural context for Aramaic studies. Maintaining a high level of practical aptitude remains a challenge for the future, especially when we are dealing with such diverse languages and sources as is the case with Aramaic studies. After all, study programs give students less and less time to acquaint themselves thoroughly with the primary sources. But as history shows, this is the best long-term investment one can make; conceptual frameworks come and go. Scholarly progress is always a combination of serendipity (such as the unexpected discovery of new texts, which happens all the time) and the availability of capable, well-educated individuals. At the same time, the rapid spread of information through modern media and the scale, by now immeasurably large, of public discourse calls for accessible but empirically grounded insights. At once, the overwhelming amount of bits and pieces of evidence available, the use of which even in scholarship is not always controlled by direct access to the material and familiarity with the most recent state of affairs, raises questions of coherence and connection, also within Aramaic. The very core of this coherence is the language itself.

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar The grammatical blueprint of Aramaic strongly resembles that of Hebrew, Phoenician, and the “smaller” languages of Syria-Palestine; the resemblance to Classical Arabic is less strong, but here too, the relatedness is obvious. The later forms of the language developed through continuous evolution from the grammatical core that is already attested in the earliest Aramaic inscriptions of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.14 Growing geographical and social 14. More elaborately sketched in CHA, 23–37, and applied to Old and Imperial Aramaic in Holger Gzella, “Historical Outline of Aramaic Grammar,” TDOT 16:849–62.

Introduction separation further increased the internal variation that had been present from the earliest times. Still, the same basic structure of sounds, forms, sentence patterns, and vocabulary can be recognized from the beginnings of Aramaic up to the Aramaic literary languages of Late Antiquity. Greater differences, on the other hand, are found in the modern Aramaic dialects, especially as far as pronunciation and the verbal system are concerned. From a certain point onward, these dialects went their own way, influenced also by close contacts with other languages, which stimulated their diversification. But since they grew up under the shadow of conservative written languages for many centuries, we only have indirect evidence for the period in which they gained their shape. In order to show some concrete data from the language we are talking about, we will quickly sketch the grammar and then illustrate it with an example. For the sounds of early Aramaic, we must largely rely on reconstruction, as the old alphabet only marks consonants and, in some cases, long vowels. But the later vocalization systems (invented in order to preserve the correct reading of liturgical texts), transcriptions of Aramaic words and names in other writing systems, and the comparison to related languages give us certain indications about how we should envision this pronunciation. The changes that affected the pronunciation over time were systematically charted by Klaus Beyer (who had a great gift for music), one of his lasting contributions. In this way, he was able to bring the original sounds of Aramaic from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE back to life, although new material will doubtlessly enable further refinement of his system.15 Usually, we can only reconstruct so-called phonemes, which are the basic sounds that can produce a difference in meaning in a specific language. In English, for instance, “sat” and “sad” are different words, but the only difference, at least in American pronunciation, is the final sound: t or d at the end of the word. So t and d are different phonemes in English. Whether the t is pronounced with a light breath of air (“aspirated”) or not in this position does not matter (making aspirated and unaspirated t “allophones,” purely phonetic variants that do not affect the meaning), while such a difference can be phonemic in other languages. Only the study of the modern dialects tells us about the level of variation that may occur. The “pure” consonants—or more precisely, the consonantal phonemes that can be reconstructed for all of premodern Aramaic—are identified and categorized by their place of articulation and presence or absence of voicing (the difference between English z and s, or v and f). The so-called laryngeals ’ (the 15. Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer, 3 vols. (Göttingen, 1984–2004).

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar so-called glottal stop, not written in English but pronounced at the beginning of both syllables in uh-oh) and h were pronounced in the throat, as were the pharyngeals ‘ (a restricted sound made deep in the throat) and ḥ (halfway between the Scots ch of loch and the normal h). The velars g (always hard as in go) and k were pronounced against the soft palate. The sibilants z and s are hissing sounds; the dentals d and t are pronounced by placing the tongue tip against the teeth; and the bilabials b and p are pronounced with the lips. The liquids l and r gain their sound by shaping the air flowing through the oral cavity; the nasals m and n (the latter normally assimilates to a following consonant) make the air flow through the nasal cavity. The semivowels w (originally as in water, later shifting to v in some varieties) and y (as in you) often combine with a preceding vowel to form a diphthong. The palatovelar š sounds like sh in ship and is often transliterated that way in nonscientific contexts. Additionally, k, s, and t have so-called emphatic counterparts that are traditionally transliterated as q, ṣ, and ṭ; their pronunciation changed over time and cannot be determined with certainty for every period. Originally, they were probably pronounced with a following glottal stop (so like k’ and t’), ṣ also with a t at the onset (making it sound like ts’). These twenty-two sounds each correspond to one sign of the Aramaic alphabet (see chapter 2). Besides these, the earliest attested form of Aramaic also must have had the interdentals ḏ (th as in this) and ṯ (th as in thin), as well as an “emphatic” ṯ—a typically Aramaic velar sound that probably was pronounced similarly to ˙q (as it is spelled with the same letter in the oldest Aramaic texts) and Scots ch as in loch (based on Aramaic names in Mesopotamian transcriptions, which reflect how speakers of another language heard this sound)—and the lateral ś, which, to put it bluntly, sounds like what happens when you prepare to imitate a goose’s hissing but then end up pronouncing an l instead of an s (the same sound as Welsh ll as in Llewelyn). All of these sounds were spelled with the same letters as sounds that were pronounced similarly, for example ḏ with z or ś with š. The modern reader must rely on knowledge of a word’s etymology to remove the ambiguity. It is unclear whether Aramaic also had a ḫ (like Scots ch) and ġ (like some pronunciations of French r as in rouge); if so, they were spelled with the same signs as ḥ and ‘. During the first millennium BCE, they all merged with other sounds, although their original spelling was preserved for a long time in highly frequent words, much like the preservation of gh (originally pronounced like Scots or German ch) in spellings like light, night, or laugh. The interdentals already merged with the dentals d, t, and ṭ at an early point in time, followed by a merger of the unidentified velar spelled as q with ‘ (middle of the seventh century BCE) and eventually ś with s (second century BCE onward). 17

Introduction Changes in the spelling that would otherwise be inexplicable show that these etymologically distinct sounds were pronounced differently than the writing system would lead us to believe before these mergers took place. The “pure” or “phonemic” vowels of Aramaic can securely be reconstructed to have included at least short a, e, and o (the latter two are also sometimes transcribed as i and u, their counterparts in other Semitic languages like Classical Arabic), as well as the long vowels (conventionally transcribed with a bar on top indicating length) ā, ī, and ū, and also a long “open” ē (more accurately ǣ, like French è); secondary vowels include the closed ē (like French é) from earlier ay and ō (like French o) from earlier aw. A host of changes introduced many more consonants and vowels into the modern Aramaic dialects. The guttural and velar sounds, lacking in many European languages, gave Aramaic a somewhat “muffled” sound, comparable to that of Arabic. The morphology of Aramaic, like that of other Semitic languages, is based on a kind of inflection that does not just add grammatical elements (“morphemes”) to a word, but also changes the base. This is a characteristic that Semitic shares with Indo-European languages, including English (compare the vowel changes in “swim,” “swam,” “swum”). In Semitic, including Aramaic, words are very often derived from abstract “roots” that usually consist of three consonants (sometimes two consonants and a long vowel or a semivowel) and refer to an overarching, very general meaning. The individual nouns and verbs are formed by unchanging patterns of vowels and sometimes prefixes and suffixes that are added to this root, as in malk “king,” malkā “queen,” malakū “kingship,” and the many different forms of the verb malak “to reign.” They all share the three consonants m-l-k as their common root, but this is an abstraction that only occurs as an “ingredient” of actual words. But especially with basic nouns, the vowels do not belong to a separate pattern but are an essential part of the word: the a of kalb “dog” is invariable, not a secondary addition to a nonexistent original root klb “to be doglike,” although it is possible to derive verbs from these basic nouns. Other characteristics of the Semitic languages are the—at least initially— rare use of possessive pronouns (possessive suffixes are used instead), the absence of a neuter gender besides the masculine and feminine, and the impossibility of regular nominal compounding, so productive in Indo-European languages (genitive constructions are used instead, so instead of “homeowner,” “owner of a/the house”). Another feature is the use of separate verbal stems that show how an activity was performed (active, passive, affecting the subject, causative, causative-passive, and so forth), often marking very subtle distinctions. 18

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar The inflection of nominal forms (declension) is fairly simple, in part because the older case system, still attested in Classical Arabic, had already fallen into disuse in the oldest Aramaic known to us. In nouns and adjectives, endings mark the difference between masculine and feminine gender (although some nouns are feminine without marking their gender), singular and plural number (the numerals “two,” “two hundred,” and natural pairs like some body parts preserve traces of an original dual number), and what is known as “state.” State indicates the difference between the indefinite form (absolute state), a form that expresses a genitive construction with the following word (construct state), and the definite form (emphatic or determined state). The latter is a unique feature of Aramaic compared to the other Semitic languages, where definiteness is either left completely unmarked (as in Latin or Russian) or marked by a preceding definite article (as in English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, and many other languages). The endings are the following: Singular

Plural

abs. cstr. det. abs. cstr. det.

Masculine malk “king” malk “king of ” malk-ā “the king” malak-īn “kings” malak-ay “kings of ” malak-ayyā “the kings”

Feminine malk-ā “queen” malk-at “queen of ” malk-tā “the queen” malak-ān “queens” malak-āt “queens of ” malak-ātā “the queens”

Nouns like malk that consist of three consonants and one short vowel had a slightly different base in the plural, with another short a in the second syllable. This is typical of all the Semitic languages of Syria-Palestine. The feminine plural of the absolute state in -ān is only attested in Aramaic, making it a distinctive feature. Also typical of Aramaic, the long -ā of the determined state goes back to a more original -ā’. The final glottal stop (’) dropped off around 800 BCE, by the latest, but was retained as a historical spelling for many centuries afterward. Later, the masculine plural construct state ending ay was contracted to -ē, but this development is very hard to date. Slight differences occur with some types of nouns and adjectives, especially those ending in a long vowel, although the system is largely the same. Thus, the inflection is much simpler than that of Latin, Greek, Russian, and many other Indo-European languages. The inflection of verbs (conjugation) is a bit more complex. That is because it is two dimensional: first, the so-called stem determines what kind of an action is expressed (such as passive or causative); and then a set of prefixes and suffixes 19

Introduction added to the base, which differs for each verb stem, marks the tense, temporal nature, and factual or hypothetical nature of the action. The nominal parts of the verbs, such as the participle and the infinitive, also differ per verb stem. The system of the conjugations themselves is originally fairly simple: the two mainstays are the “perfect,” where suffixes indicate the person (“I,” “you”), number, and, except for the first person, gender of the subject and the “imperfect,” where this is marked both through prefixes and through suffixes. (Since both “perfect” and “imperfect” are merely conventional, albeit convenient, labels that do not adequately reproduce the true functional range of either category as it is now understood in light of the most recent research, I use quotation marks around them.) As there are originally only these two basic forms that function as the “powerhouse” of every sentence’s meaning, the so-called temporal, aspectual, or modal value of a verbal form is often ambiguous, only to be precisely determined through close reading of the texts and the discernment that comes with experience. The “perfect” marks either past tense or completion (scholars have long debated which usage is primary); the “imperfect” marks present or future tense, incompletion, and nuances in the verb’s truth value. All these uses are related: for example, actions in the present are necessarily uncompleted, while the future is always uncertain. Especially in the case of the “imperfect,” it can be hard to isolate one particular shade of meaning. The relevant forms of the basic stem of the root ktb “to write” are the following: “Perfect” “I wrote” “you (m.sg.) wrote” katab-tī “you (f.sg.) wrote” katab “he wrote” katab-at “she wrote” katab-nā “we wrote” katab-tūm “you (m.pl.) wrote” katab-tenn “you (f.pl.) wrote” katab-ū “they (m.) wrote” katab-ū/-ā “they (f.) wrote”

Singular 1. m./f. katab-t 2. m. katab-tā 2. f. 3. m. 3. f. Plural 1. m./f. 2. m. 2. f. 3. m. 3. f.

“Imperfect” “I write” “you (m.sg.) write” ta-ktob-īn “you (f.sg.) write” ya-ktob “he writes” ta-ktob “she writes” na-ktob “we write” ta-ktob-ūn “you (m.pl.) write” ta-ktob-(ā)n “you (f.pl.) write” ya-ktob-ūn “they (m.) write” ya-ktob-(ā)n “they (f.) write” ’a-ktob ta-ktob

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar During the first millennium BCE, the Aramaic languages also possessed a “short” form of the “imperfect.” The formal difference with the “long” form is that the second person feminine singular and the second and third person masculine plural lack their final -n; in the other persons, most verbs do not make a formal distinction. The “short imperfect” expresses commands, as in ta-ktob-ī “you (f.sg.) should write,” but it was gradually replaced by the “long” form and disappeared completely by the end of the first century BCE. Without its prefix, it is identical in form to the imperative, which did remain in use throughout the history of Aramaic: ktob, ktob-ū “write!” (singular and plural, respectively, addressed to male listeners). Verbs that express actions, like ktb, usually have an a in the second syllable of the “perfect” base (as in katab) and an o in the “imperfect” (ktob). The Semitic languages also possess many roots that indicate states, such as šlm “to be complete.” Here, the “perfect,” which has an adjectival function, often has an e, while the “imperfect” has an a: šalem “it is completed” and originally yašlam “it will be completed.” When the “imperfect” base had an a, the a of the prefix changed to an e at a certain point, giving us yešlam. This e was then extended to all basic stem “imperfects,” as the later vocalization traditions all show, but when exactly this happened remains controversial. The feminine plural “imperfect” forms with an ā in the suffix are secondary as well, but when these forms were introduced is also unclear. Moreover, it is uncertain what the original form of the third person feminine plural “perfect” ending was, as it is not attested in the earliest texts (feminine subjects happen to be very rare in those texts), while both variants, -ū and -ā, are attested at later times. Roots that contain a long vowel instead of their second or third consonant have undergone sound changes resulting in slightly different forms. These are the kinds of puzzles that the historical grammar of Aramaic investigates. Weighing all the facts, despite the material’s limitations, and reaching an optimally reasoned proposal that in the best cases has the elegance of a mathematical proof is an outstanding exercise in methodology. For an important part, this is motivated from the desire to contribute to the scientific quest for truth: scholars want to discover the historical facts for their own sake. But these details also help us understand larger developments in the history of Aramaic, especially the coexistence and mutual interaction of dialects and written languages. The nominal forms of the verb are similar to those of English: the infinitive maktab (later mektab; Old Aramaic also has an unprefixed form) “to write” is not inflected; the active participle kāteb “writing” and the passive participle katīb “written” are inflected as adjectives. During the first millennium BCE, 21

Introduction they were incorporated into the finite verbal system, giving kāteb used in combination with a personal pronoun the function of a present tense “write(s).” In most of the modern Aramaic languages, this development has been carried through to its conclusion: the participles have given rise to a host of new, complex constructions that have completely replaced the old “perfect” and “imperfect” and completely reshaped the verbal system. This goes to show to what degree linguistic structures can change, if only evolution is given enough time to do its work. Linguists of all stripes, then, have much to learn from Aramaic. As is the case for all Semitic languages, the finite and nominal forms of every verbal root are based on a so-called stem. This stem determines the base to which the prefixes and suffixes of each form are added. For the neutral stem, as we have seen, these bases are katab- for the “perfect,” -ktob- for the “imperfect,” kāteb for the active participle, and so forth. The stems reflect the relationship between the action and the subject and, if present, the direct object. The “factitive” stem, for instance, often indicates that the state expressed by the basic stem is brought about, or it focuses on the result: for example, rbī in the basic stem means “to grow,” while its factitive stem means “to raise” or “to amplify.” The factitive is marked by a long second root consonant: zbn “to sell” (in the basic stem, “to buy”), “perfect” zabben, “imperfect” yazabben (later with the prefix vowel e, so yezabben), active participle mazabben, passive participle mazabban, infinitive zabbānā (and various byforms in the individual dialects). The “causative” stem, on the other hand, is marked with a prefix ha- (later ’a-) and generally also has a causal meaning, but with subtly different nuances than the factitive stem: cf. šlṭ “to obtain” (in the basic stem, “to have authority”; related to the Arabic word “sultan”), “perfect” hašleṭ (changing to ’ašleṭ in the course of the first millennium BCE), “imperfect” yahašleṭ (later yašleṭ), active participle mahašleṭ (mašleṭ), passive mahašlaṭ (mašlaṭ), infinitive hašlāṭā (later ’ašlāṭā and byforms). The basic, factitive, and causative stems each have a reflexive or passive counterpart that is formed by the addition of a prefixed -t-. During the first millennium BCE, Aramaic passives could also be formed by simply changing the vowels of the active stem in question, but these variants were replaced by the t-stems by the end of the first millennium BCE. In many cases, the factitive and causative stems and their passive counterparts developed specialized meanings that are sometimes understandable, but often unpredictable. As a result, most roots only occur in some of the theoretically possible verb stems, and in some cases, the basic stem is even completely lacking. The future of Aramaic lexicography has an important task in getting to the bottom of all these subtleties in the various stages of the language, which will greatly improve our understanding of the texts. 22

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar There are also some pronominal elements: personal and demonstrative pronouns and suffixes that indicate possession (malk-ī “my king”) or a personal direct object (katab-eh “he wrote it”). Uninflecting words include prepositions (especially ba- “in”, la- “for,” ka- “as,” men “from”), conjunctions (especially wa“and”), negations (lā “no, not”), and interjections (hā “behold!”). In sentence formation, the verb normally comes first, but contact with other languages and internal developments gradually led to the disappearance of clear tendencies in word order. The later stages of Aramaic are characterized by constructions with redundant anticipatory suffixes (as in bar-eh dī malkā “his son, the king’s” for “the king’s son”). Subordinate clauses are introduced by several conjunctions based on the relative particle dī (“which,” introducing relative clauses), such as qodām dī “before,” ka-dī “as soon as,” and so forth. Since there is no verb for “to have” and there was originally no copula either, nominal sentences are fairly frequent, as in sepr l-eh “a book to him” for “he has a book” or šappīrā hī “beautiful she” for “she is beautiful.” Let us consider a short example to illustrate the systematic overview of the grammatical particulars of Aramaic sketched above. Several of the most important features occur in two verses from the hymn of Daniel 2:20–23. Daniel, a Jewish exile at the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, is pressured to interpret the ruler’s frightening dream. Such a task would be impossible for a mere mortal, as Nebuchadnezzar also wants to hear the contents of his dream—probably to prevent people from randomly making up an interpretation. Only God could reveal the contents and meaning of the dream to Daniel: it concerns the proverbial “colossus with feet of clay,” a gigantic yet vulnerable statue symbolizing the eventual defeat of all worldly powers and the coming of the kingdom of God. Afterward, Daniel thanks him with a hymnic song of praise that concludes with the following words in the biblical text as it has come down to us (Daniel 2:22–23): (22) hū gālē ‘ammīqāṯā u-msattrāṯā yāḏa‘ mā ḇa-ḥašōḵā u-nhōrā ‘immeh šrē He reveals the deep and hidden things, he knows what is in darkness and the light resides with him. (23) lāḵ ’ælāh ’aḇāhāṯī mhōḏē u-mšabbaḥ ’anā dī ḥoḵmṯā u-ḡḇūrṯā yhaḇt lī

Introduction u-ḵ‘an hōḏa‘tanī dī ḇ‘ēnā minnāḵ dī millaṯ malkā hōḏa‘tænā To you, God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and strength and now you have made known to me what we requested of you, because you have made the king’s word known to us.

But this vocalization, added to the text by scribal experts to ensure the correct pronunciation in synagogal recitation, reflects the way Aramaic sounded sometime between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, while the book of Daniel was already completed around 164 BCE. The vocalized biblical manuscripts form a good starting point for the study of the texts, considering their religious significance and the direct, rather than reconstructed, evidence they provide. But for historical purists—and real philologists tend to be purists— this is equivalent to reading Homer with Modern Greek pronunciation or, oh horror, playing a romantic rendition of Bach on a grand piano, going heavy on the pedals. The consonantal text of this passage is largely corroborated by fragments found at Qumran. A few small differences indicate changes that snuck in during the long transmission.16 But for the original pronunciation, we must use indirect clues to “cancel out” the sound changes that have taken place between the completion of the book of Daniel and the vocalization, similar to the practice of historically informed performance in music (where sound recordings dating to the time of composition are not available either). The most far-reaching change is the loss of unstressed short vowels in syllables that end in a vowel, since this greatly obscured the morphology’s original transparency. Long unstressed vowels at the end of a word were similarly lost in pronunciation at a certain point, but stress shifts and other secondary changes make the effects of that change harder to determine. Also, the consonants b, g, d, k, p, and t were spirantized when following a vowel sometime in the first centuries CE, which means that they “softened” their pronunciation (p to f, t to th, etc.), a change that is clearly marked in the vocalization and indicated 16. For instance, the Qumran fragment—which, unlike the biblical text, lacks vowel signs—does not read yd‘ in verse 22, but wyd‘, with the conjunction “and”; the beginning of verse 23 reads lk l’lh, repeating the preposition on the second word; and further on, instead of gbwrt’ “strength,” it reads nhyr . . . followed by a lacuna, suggesting the word nahhīrūtā “illumination.” It is often debated which reading is more original; the discipline that deals with such questions is known as textual criticism.

Hallmarks of Aramaic Grammar in academic transcription by adding a little dash above or below the letter. The shift of short e and o to i and u in some Aramaic languages (including the dialect underlying the Biblical Aramaic vocalization) did not take place before the seventh or eighth century CE. Reconstructing the pronunciation around the year 164 BCE along these lines gives us the following result: (22) hū gālē ‘ammīqātā wa-masattarātā yāda‘ mā ba-ḥašōkā wa-nahōrā ‘emmeh šarē (23) lákā ’elāh ’abāhātī mahōdē wa-mašabbaḥ ’anā dī ḥokmtā wa-gabūrtā yahábtā lī wa-ka‘an hōda‘tānī dī ba‘ēnā mennákā dī mellat malkā hōda‘tānā

Verse 22 mainly contains descriptions of God’s characteristics, using masculine singular active participles of the basic stem, gālē “revealing” and yāda‘ “knowing”; šarē “dwelling” is a passive participle. The root glī ends in a long vowel, which is why the ē of the participle is long here (unlike the short e in kāteb); in yd‘, the final guttural ‘ has changed the etymological e to a, hence yāda‘. As these participles are all used predicatively (i.e., “revealing” and not “the revealing one”), they are in the absolute state. The pronoun hū “he” at the beginning and nahōrā “the light” (related to Arabic nūr “light,” as in the name Nureddin, “Light of the Faith”) in the third line both function as the subject. The participles are thus best translated as present tenses: “he reveals,” “he knows,” “it dwells.” The other nominal forms are definite—in other words, they are in the determined state—since they refer to things that are immediately recognizable to the reader: ‘ammīqātā wa-masattarātā “the deep and hidden things” (feminine plural, as is usual for generalizing expressions that are simply formed with a nominalized adjective in English: “the deep and hidden”), ḥašōkā “the dark” and nahōrā “the light” (masculine singular). The prepositions ba- “in” and ‘emm “with” introduce adverbial phrases of place; ‘emm additionally has a third person masculine singular suffix: “with him.” The interrogative pronoun mā “what?” can be used indefinitely, as in English: “what” meaning “all that.” As Biblical Aramaic had not yet developed a copula, we must supply “(there) is” in translation, but in Aramaic, this nominal sentence is already complete without the presence of a verb. As befits his hymnic style, the author has used a number of synonyms for the conceptual opposition between “revealed,” “knowing,” and “light” on the one hand and “concealed” and “darkness” on the other. Partici25

Introduction ples are very frequent in hymnic descriptions, as in other languages (such as ancient Greek). Clearly, this is a poetic text. In verse 23, the author explains why God is praiseworthy, as is also common in biblical psalms: he relates God’s eternal characteristics to concrete events. The first line forms a transition, using two participles, once again indicating a present tense. Here, however, they do not express timeless truths, but events situated in the “here and now”: mahōdē wa-mašabbaḥ ’anā “I give thanks and praise” (the subject, ’anā “I,” comes at the end of the phrase in this case, while hū “he” at the beginning of verse 22 places the emphasis on God). These two verbs are always used in derived stems in Aramaic: the causative stem mahōdē from ydī “to give thanks, agree” (the initial y was originally a w, which was preserved in this form, mahō- having developed from mahaw-) and the factitive stem of šbḥ. The use of the factitive here may reflect an original “declarative” meaning, “to declare praiseworthy,” which is especially connected to this stem. As the recipient of praise, God is again placed at the front of the sentence: lakā “to you,” which is the preposition la- “for” with the second person masculine singular suffix. This is specified further: the intended addressee is ’elāh ’abāhātī “the God of my fathers.” This is a genitive construction indicating possession: ’elāh is thus in the construct state, which happens to look identical to the absolute state in the masculine singular. The next word is the irregular plural of ’ab “father” (related to “Abba,” the term used by Jesus to address God according to Mark 14:36); this word exceptionally has a plural ending that resembles the feminine suffix -āt (but this is purely a quirk of the language and really, really has no gender-related implications!). A possessive suffix of the first person singular, -ī “my,” is attached at the end. The next three lines of verse 23 switch to “perfect” forms, as they refer to events in the past, although their effects are ongoing: yahabtā “you gave/ have given” (in Aramaic, as in Hebrew and Greek, God is simply addressed with the second person singular; the conventional English translations with thou in Bible translations were not originally meant to mark an especially polite form like French vous or German Sie, but reflect the obsolete second person singular form of English, which was later replaced by you, formerly limited to the plural) and ba‘ēnā “we (have) requested,” as well as hōda‘tānī and hōda‘tānā with first person singular and plural suffixes: “you (have) made known to me/us.” These last two forms are causative stems of yd‘ “to know,” which we already saw in verse 22 (since this verb also developed from wd‘ with a w-, these forms show the same development of haw- to hō- as mahōdē). Verse 23 also contains two examples of subordinate clauses with dī, first dī ba‘ēnā “what we requested,” then dī mellat malkā hōda‘tānā 26

The Evolution of Aramaic and Its Periodization “because you have made the king’s word known to us.” Like ’elāh ’abāhātī “the God of my fathers,” mellat malkā is a genitive construction, but with a feminine noun like mellā the construct state of the singular does have a separate ending: -at. Of course, this is only one small example, but this crash course should provide a first impression of the grammar of the older stages of Aramaic, how the pronunciation changed, and how flexible the grammatical system is. This is the tried and tested method—first an overview, then a detailed explanation employing authentic texts—in which instruction in Aramaic took and still takes place.

The Evolution of Aramaic and Its Periodization The grammatical system attested in the earliest textual sources underwent many changes as Aramaic continued to evolve and spread. These changes were caused by the same basic factors that also cause variation in other languages: chronological, geographical, and social diversity. Aramaic’s extraordinary historical, spatial, and cultural depth make it a textbook example of the causes and effects of language change in the long term. At the same time, these changes often provide information about the underlying historical processes, sometimes shedding light on periods for which other historical sources are almost completely absent. In the following chapters, we will see many examples that underscore the importance of historical linguistics for the political and social history of the ancient Near East. A central factor is the unguided development of any natural language. Differences in pronunciation, imprecise applications of grammatical rules, and influences from other languages always cause some variation between different generations of speakers and over time result in systematic changes. In English, for instance, brethren, the old plural of brother, was replaced by brothers, formed by adding an -s to the singular form by analogy of other plural forms, limiting the older form to a restricted, religious usage. The breakdown of the syntactic difference between who and whom, originally different case forms like he and him or I and me, is another example: the majority of English speakers would now say, “Who did you see?” or, overcompensating, “Whom was there?” Even obvious imitations of foreign usage can easily become normal parts of the language; current examples in English are generally limited to particular varieties, such as New York City English expressions like “You want I should go?” (a word-for-word translation of Yiddish du vilst ikh zol geyn?) or 27

Introduction Irish English expressions like “I have my breakfast eaten,” with the participle following the object as in Irish tá mo bhricfeasta ite agam. Naturally, similar developments also affected Aramaic. The most important sound change was the loss of short vowels in unstressed syllables ending in a vowel (so-called open syllables) around 250 CE, by the latest. That is why the Aramaic greeting is still pronounced as šlāmā (or, among the Syriac Orthodox, šlōmō) instead of šalāmā, originally “peace.” Long unstressed vowels at the end of a word were already lost a bit earlier, probably around 100 BCE, and the pronunciation of the consonants b, g, d, k, p, and t was “softened” after a vowel, b shifting to v, p to f, and so forth. This development can be dated to sometime between the first century BCE and the third CE, but it is difficult to establish exactly how and where it got started. These changes gave the literary Aramaic languages of Late Antiquity their characteristic sound and are still noticeable to some degree in the modern dialects. Sometimes, old grammatical forms were lost and new forms came into being, partially due to the influence of other languages. Multilingual speakers quite easily and unconsciously copy syntactic patterns and function words without concrete meanings from one language to another in order to process more efficiently the different languages they speak. At the same time, the grammar and basic vocabulary, which are crucial for unimpeded communication with monolingual speakers, are more resistant to change. As a result, most of the modern dialects of Aramaic—or rather, their unknown ancestors— underwent a wholesale restructuring of the verbal system, resulting in a set of verbal conjugations that almost all derive from the old active and passive participles. This is the most far-reaching change that affected Aramaic in its entire attested history. Another modern Aramaic change created bound prefixes out of independent verbs, such as the future tense marker bed-, which comes from the participle bā‘ē d- “wanting that” by way of “about to” (compare English will, which also once meant “to want”), a sense that is already attested in the Aramaic of Late Antiquity and probably already occurs in Biblical Aramaic. The same verb b‘ī “to want” is used with this meaning in Daniel 2:13; whereas translations like the New International Version state that “men were sent to look for Daniel and his friends to put them to death,” the Aramaic literally says that “Daniel and his friends were about to be executed.” And of course, the frequent use of Aramaic in multilingual contexts over three thousand years saw it absorb countless loanwords from especially Akkadian (law, science, and popular religion), Old Persian (administrative terminology), Hebrew (religious vocabulary, in the Jewish varieties), Greek (architectural and administrative terms at first, later 28

The Evolution of Aramaic and Its Periodization also many Christian theological terms), Arabic, and Kurdish as well as other Iranian languages (everyday words in many modern dialects). A second important cause of linguistic variation is geographical dispersion. When speakers move away as a group and lose contact with their place of origin, regional differences crop up, such as the loss of r in words like here in many English varieties of England and the Southern Hemisphere, which is preserved in most other varieties. This also holds within smaller areas, as the huge differences between the local dialects of cities in the north of England like Liverpool and Manchester show. Even speakers one village over may well pronounce a particular word slightly differently from their neighbors, although they have no trouble understanding each other. As speakers of different dialects within the same region usually do have some level of interaction (due to intermarriage, trade, cultural contacts, etc.), certain changes can spread like waves over the whole “dialect continuum.” As the geographical distance grows larger, the differences in the spoken language also increase. Since the oldest Aramaic sources known to us were usually composed in a standardized written language, owing to their roots in scribal circles, it is only very rarely possible to identify dialectal differences in the first millennium BCE. However, shared developments of pronunciation or morphology between the western and eastern periphery do suggest the existence of a continuous network of neighboring Aramaic dialects spoken from Mesopotamia to the Syrian coast. From the Roman period onward at the latest, we can clearly distinguish a more conservative Western Aramaic and a more innovative Eastern Aramaic branch. The latter, for instance, replaced the original Common Aramaic definite masculine plural ending -ayyā with -ē (probably resulting from the much older influence of Akkadian, the language spoken in Mesopotamia, where the Eastern Aramaic dialects developed). Eastern Aramaic subsequently extended the definite forms of nouns to replace the indefinite forms in most contexts, so that malkā “the king” also came to mean “a king” and determination could only be emphasized by saying “that king” (giving rise to a new set of definite articles in modern Aramaic, similar to the definite articles of the Romance languages like French le, Spanish el, and Italian il, all of which go back to the Latin definite pronoun ille “that”). In the Aramaic literary languages of Late Antiquity, these differences become even more pronounced. Both dialect groups also sometimes each use different words. For example, Western Aramaic has the root ḥmī “to see” instead of Common Aramaic ḥzī, while Eastern Aramaic has zdq for “to be righteous” instead of ṣdq. Once a new literary tradition is established, as was the case with Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, and Samaritan in the west and Jewish Baby29

Introduction lonian, Syriac, and Mandaic in the east, we usually see some influence from the local spoken language, although the written language then “fossilizes” and no longer changes in step with the vernacular. Ultimately, most standard languages both within the Aramaic family and elsewhere derive from a regional dialect. Of course, the true scope of these differences, from general characteristics of entire groups down to the most subtle nuances, can only be seen in the dozens of Aramaic vernaculars spoken today, where they are not obscured by simplifying orthographies or conservative writing conventions. But there is no reason to suppose that this variation was not present from the earliest time onward; and in the Islamic period the fragmentation of speaker populations and the lack of a larger network of Aramaic dialects further increased this diversity. Speakers’ language use is influenced not just by their regional origins, but also by their social background. This may reflect their upbringing or education, but also the social group they identify with. In British English, for instance, subtleties of pronunciation and vocabulary immediately reveal if speakers wish to present themselves as members of the upper or at least upper middle class (or to purposefully avoid such associations). These differences are used to mark a certain group identity. It therefore seems likely that the older Aramaic standard languages were originally mainly based on the pronunciation of an upper crust of scribes and officials. The formalization of a folksy dialect to a written language, as occurred with Jewish Palestinian around the first century CE, reflects structural social changes, in this case the religious consolidation of a group that did not stem from the old priestly and ruling elite. Syriac Christian scholars from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages also occupied themselves with normative language use; their works contain remarks about the “proper” way of writing or saying things as far as pronunciation, grammatical form, or word choice is concerned. Due to the prestige of the ecclesiastical tradition, the learned language of present-day Christian Aramaic speakers also draws on Classical Syriac, similar to the highly academic katharevousa (“purifying”) style introduced by Greek language purists based on the literary language of the Hellenistic period. The influence of religious identity is especially clear in situations where even in the same town and at the same time, the modern forms of Aramaic used by Jewish and Christian speakers are clearly distinct. This may sound strange, but it essentially reflects the same type of social stratification responsible for the differences between Cajun and Creole dialects in Louisiana or between the accents of New Yorkers of Italian or Jewish descent. Other hallmarks of written language include longer sentences, more syntactic subordination, and richly varied vocabulary. Besides the basic distinc30

The Evolution of Aramaic and Its Periodization tions between formal and informal or between written and oral language (with many gradual, intermediate forms in between), the language of a certain area at a certain time can show variation along many more axes. In many cultures, differing social networks produce differences in the speech of men and women. Moreover, certain communicative contexts have their own conventions, like a PhD defense or a case in court. This can already be shown for the older stages of Aramaic: the concise tone of the Aramaic translation of the Bisitun inscription relating the military campaigns of King Darius, the verbose style of the formal letters written by his officials, with their many impersonal constructions, and the straightforward personal messages written on potsherds found at Elephantine are all from roughly the same time and societal context and were written in the same language (Imperial Aramaic), but they still employ different “registers.” These differences also recur in scientific literature, whether we are dealing with astronomical texts from Qumran, medical treatises in Syriac, or the continuous tradition of Aramaic legal terminology whose traces can still be seen in the rabbinic practice of our time. In fact, variation can even be found at the level of an individual speaker’s personal usage, the “idiolect.” Due to its long documented history, decentralized development, and heavy usage, Aramaic can only very generally be divided up into separate periods. The dividing lines between these periods usually coincide with changing political or cultural circumstances, which are followed by changes in language policy. But since a new literary language often builds on an existing spoken vernacular and also inherits features from older written traditions, the individual stages of Aramaic are related to one another through a process of continuous evolution. In the shadow of unified written languages, the natural development of the local dialects continues, so that a literary official or cultural language can coexist with a regional dialect. As Aramaic dialects in the premodern period only left sporadic and indirect traces at best, such as when influence from the vernacular surfaces as a mistake in a formal text or when a dialect is itself promoted to a literary vehicle of expression, it is very difficult to ascertain how much they differed from each other. Bearing this in mind, we can roughly distinguish:17 the early Old Aramaic of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE and the younger language of the seventh 17. See the discussion of the various classification models in CHA, 47–52, and the historical summary on pp. 383–87. A maximally differentiated classification was proposed by Klaus Beyer in The Aramaic Language: Its Distribution and Subdivisions (Göttingen, 1986), a translation of the introduction to the first volume of his Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer.

Introduction and sixth centuries; then the Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, whose relatively high degree of standardization forms a new beginning; and the new local written languages of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, from roughly the third century BCE to the third century CE (Nabatean, Palmyrene, Edessan/Old Syriac, Hatran, Arsacid). The growing influence of regional dialects makes a geographic linguistic classification useful from this point onward. The religious Aramaic literary languages of Late Antiquity from the fourth century CE onward belong to either Western (Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, Samaritan) or Eastern Aramaic (Jewish Babylonian, Syriac, Mandaic) and are only partially based on the written languages of the preceding era. Their usage continued in the following centuries, in the case of Syriac even until the present, but the Arabic conquests of the seventh century CE disrupted the Aramaic dialect continuum and reduced the Aramaic vernaculars to minority languages. Like the old written languages, the modern instantiations of the Aramaic dialects belong to a Western (Ma‘lula and a few other villages near Damascus) and Eastern branch. The latter consists of three subgroups: Turoyo and Mlaḥso, originally spoken in southeastern Turkey; the very diverse Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, with a broad distribution ranging from southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq to northwestern Iran; and nearly extinct Neo-Mandaic, formerly in use among members of the Mandean religion in southern Iraq and the adjacent part of Iran. Western Neo-Aramaic and the three Eastern Neo-Aramaic subgroups are not mutually comprehensible. The Western Aramaic varieties of Late Antiquity, on the other hand, strongly resemble one another; the Eastern Aramaic varieties show some coherence, but by this time, Western and Eastern Aramaic were probably no longer easily comprehensible to speakers from the other dialect cluster.

Overview of This Book and a Guide to Further Study This book aims to shed light on the diverse history of Aramaic from its earliest known attestations until the present day in a concise yet holistic fashion. It will not primarily focus on the brief flourishing of the Aramaic city-states in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE—that would be a history of the Arameans proper. Nor does it aim to write the social history of the many political and religious communities, each with their own ethnic background, that subsequently employed Aramaic for oral or written expression and still do so. Rather, it is centered on the language itself and the history of its development. 32

Overview of This Book and a Guide to Further Study For no less than three millennia, this language has been a leitmotif in an endless process of continuity and discontinuity, connecting very different Middle Eastern cultures; this gives Aramaic a special place in this region’s famously long cultural memory. Following the historical-linguistic approach, the first five chapters will pre sent the unfolding of a shared Aramaic writing tradition in chronological order: the early standardization of the chancery language of a handful of independent princedoms in Syria; the international language of administration of three successive world empires, those of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians; the birth of Aramaic literature, parts of which would be included in the Bible; and the breakup of this shared tradition into the local Aramaic written languages of the Hellenistic and Roman periods as well as their relationship to Greek and Roman globalization, an important watershed in the history of Aramaic. The next three chapters then take a more cultural approach and treat the individual, identity-forming Aramaic literatures that sprang from regional Aramaic spoken and written languages between the Roman period and Late Antiquity. They are associated with various religious groups—Syriac Christians, Jews in Palestine and Babylonia, Samaritans, Mandeans, and others—that all still exist today. In these chapters, the emphasis will shift to the historical reception and the evolving literary tradition. The penultimate chapter discusses the role Aramaic played in Arabia and its less visible heritage in Islamic culture. Finally, the book concludes with a concise overview of the modern Aramaic dialects, their importance as markers of identity, and their speakers. Every chapter is thematically structured and sketches the shifting roles of Aramaic from various perspectives. The three-dimensional perspective described above will function as the basis on which the pluriformity of Aramaic will be explained as its most important characteristic. The first dimension refers to the natural development of the language, the changes it underwent over time, and the factors that may have caused this. The second dimension is the variation between coexisting regional varieties of Aramaic, as documented from the earliest period onward. The third dimension considers the clear dichotomy between spoken and written language and other social and stylistic differences. It will be clear that the dynamic interaction between shared, continuous writing traditions promoting unity and the great number of local vernaculars as a source of diversity is a recurring theme in the history of Aramaic. This book’s emphasis on writing cultures and scribal traditions is an important difference from other, primarily chronological or geographical, classifications 33

Introduction of Aramaic. Consequently, it will also consider the underlying cultural significance of a certain type of script and certain spelling conventions. Gothic, Hebrew, or Arabic letter shapes still each provoke different national or religious associations. And a look at the often emotional debates on spelling reform immediately reveals the cultural impact of orthography: a historical spelling may be civilized according to some (as it bears witness to one’s education and a certain level of literacy) but outdated according to others (as it unnecessarily complicates things). Conversely, a modern, more phonetic spelling can be considered either vulgar or practical. Spellings like ye olde book shoppe (where ye should historically be pronounced as “the”) and late nite drive-thru both put off a very distinct vibe, even though they do not change the pronunciation compared to the standard spelling. In the same way, Aramaic script and spelling encode important information about cultural history. For every period, we will also discuss the contacts between Aramaic and other languages: first in the context of the multilingual world empires and then, from the Hellenistic period, in that of the interaction with Greek as a prestige language and, from the Islamic period onward, with Arabic. Established literary traditions such as the use of Hebrew as the inherited language of Judaism or Greek as an international theological means of communication in Eastern Christianity with their distinctive expressions have left their marks as well. A broader, comparative perspective can also help explain why Aramaic, of all languages, has been so successful, although its original speakers never created a unified political or cultural context in which their language could naturally gain traction. This particular tenacity of Aramaic seems to result from three sociolinguistic factors: first, its rapid spread as a means of communication in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, due to the mobility of its speakers and possibly the usefulness of alphabetic script; subsequently, the consolidation as the administrative language of successive empires between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE; and finally, from the sixth or fifth century BCE at the latest, Aramaic’s growth into a prestigious vehicle of expression in the fields of law, religion, and literature, robust enough to compete later with Greek and eventually, to a certain degree, with Arabic. Several quotes from representative primary sources are provided in each chapter to illustrate the use of Aramaic from the original texts. The translations are all the author’s; references to authoritative scholarly editions may support further study. Where necessary and meaningful, established English translations will also be mentioned for those who wish to know more. The maps and images also primarily aim to illustrate the linguistic history.18 A limited 18. More visual information can be found in the documentary The Hidden Pearl: The

Overview of This Book and a Guide to Further Study selection of more specialized recent scholarly literature is cited in the footnotes in order to support the argument of the main text. The notes also mention the most useful grammars or grammar sketches, dictionaries, and historical introductions for each period. In this way, the reader is safely introduced to the most important outcomes of the scholarly discussion, which is usually conducted at a highly technical level. For the sake of methodological transparency, grammatical details will also frequently be discussed in this work. They give an impression of the field’s artisanal nature and constitute the facts on which the historical conclusions presented in these chapters are based. For further study, readers with some training in the Semitic languages, biblical studies, and the various disciplines of ancient history can consult A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam (Leiden, 2015; cited in the footnotes as CHA), by the present author, for the remaining technical philological and linguistic details. Considering that Aramaic is not just one language but an entire family, it is impossible to simply “learn Aramaic” as such; that would be a lifelong project. Even at the few universities that still offer a decent selection of courses on the ancient or modern Middle East, only a few Aramaic languages are taught with some regularity, at best. And since these are embedded in various scholarly subdisciplines, each with a high level of specialization, they are not all easily studied independently. Readers who wish to immerse themselves in Aramaic on their own would do well to start with one of the Aramaic languages that are already firmly entrenched in teaching practice, as teaching materials for these languages are readily available. The most obvious point of departure is Classical Syriac, because it is both highly standardized and well documented, as with Classical Latin. A very reliable textbook, which is easy to purchase, can be used without an instructor, and does not assume any knowledge of other Semitic languages, is John F. Healy’s Leshono Suryoyo: First Studies in Syriac (Piscataway, 2005). Those who are especially interested in the Old Testament and its setting could also start with Biblical Aramaic, although it is more sparsely attested than Syriac and less uniform. For individual study, the most useful resource is the equally accessible book by Andreas Schuele, An Introduction to Biblical Aramaic (Louisville, 2012). Some basic knowledge of Syriac or Biblical Aramaic greatly lowers the barrier to start studying other Aramaic languages with the aid of the grammatical literature cited in the footnotes, such as Old Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic, the Aramaic of the Greek and Roman periods, or the Aramaic of the targums. Its Syrian Orthodox Church and Its Ancient Aramaic Heritage (2001), commissioned by the Syriac (formerly Syrian) Orthodox Church; it can also be found online.

Introduction great influence on all later stages of Aramaic would make Imperial Aramaic a good second or third choice after Syriac or Biblical Aramaic. Afterward, the other ancient forms of Aramaic will require less and less time to master. Students of all levels may be interested in the Semitic program of the annual Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics (each year’s program can be found online from February or March onward), held in the Netherlands, which usually includes at least one older Aramaic language taught in an intensive course of ten classes. These courses generally do not require any prior knowledge of other Semitic languages. Those who can read German and want to approach Aramaic through one of the modern languages (or who want to add to their knowledge of the older varieties) can use the didactically structured textbooks by Werner Arnold, Lehrbuch des Neuwestaramäischen, second edition (Wiesbaden, 2006), on the language of Ma‘lula, or Otto Jastrow, Lehrbuch der Turoyo-Sprache (Wiesbaden, 1992), on the more widely spoken dialect of Tur Abdin. Šlomo Surayt, an online course in Turoyo, has recently been published at http://www.surayt.com. While a history of a language is obviously no substitute for a language course, this book aims to provide the historical background information necessary to make it easier for anyone interested to appreciate the incomparable richness of Aramaic as a whole: as a common heritage of Jews, Christians, and others; as a still undervalued component in the history of classical antiquity; and as a bridge between the ancient Near East and today’s Middle East (as the cultural diversity of the Islamic world has been receiving ever more attention). Should it inspire anyone to learn an Aramaic language, that would be a very nice outcome. After all, any deeper knowledge of this topic must rely on a reading of the texts themselves. The effort this takes definitely pays off: it is a beautiful sensation to experience the twists and turns Aramaic words and expressions have taken over the centuries, as is still clearly visible in the religious reinterpretation of legal and administrative terminology, and to recognize in them the larger historical processes that also shaped the language, its structure, and its vocabulary. To pave the way to such an experience is the author’s ultimate intention.