Is Aramaic and Hebrew the Same Language?
The
Israelites spoke Hebrew until they were carried away captive. When the Jews came back from Babylon, after
seventy years in captivity, they spoke the language of the Chaldeans. Was it the same as Hebrew their original
language?
Some say it
is the same language just a different dialect however the Bible says
differently. The Jews who spoke Hebrew
would need an interpreter to understand Chaldean unless they had been taught it
as a separate language.
In 2 Kings
18 v 26 we read, “Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna and Joah, said to
Rabshakeh, “Speak now to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do
not speak to us in Judean in the hearing of the people who are on the wall”
(NASB).
This was the
time when Jerusalem was surrounded by the armies of Assyria and the captain of
the Assyrian army was speaking in Hebrew to the Jewish leaders who didn’t want
the common people to hear what he was saying. In other words they were two
different languages that needed an interpreter.
When
Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon carried away the Jews to Babylon we read
that he ordered the nobles to learn Aramaic.
Daniel 1 v
3-5 says, “Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, the chief of his officials , to
bring in some of the sons of Israel, including some of the royal family and of
the nobles, youths in whom was no defect, who were good looking, showing intelligence
in every branch of wisdom, endowed with understanding and discerning knowledge,
and who had ability for serving in the king’s court; and he ordered him to teach them the literature and
language of the Chaldeans. The king
appointed for them a daily ration from the king’s choice food and from the wine
which he drank, and appointed that they should be educated three years , at the
end of which they were to enter the kings personal service”. (NASB)
When the
common Jew finally came back to Jerusalem after over seventy years Ezra the
scribe read from the book of the law. The
language of the Jews now would have been Aramaic, but the book of law would
have been in Hebrew so the Levites translated it so that the ordinary people understood
it.
Nehemiah 8 v 8, “They read from the book, from the law of God, translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading” (NASB).
Alfred Edershein in his book The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, tells us that on their return from the Babylonian captivity the language spoken by the Jews was no longer Hebrew, but Aramaen. The common people were ignorant of pure Hebrew which became the language of students and Synagogue . Even there an Interpreter was employed to translate the scripture when it was read in public (chapter 1).The name of Jesus in Aramaic was Yeshua which was a translation of the Hebrew name Yehoshua.
The common
language in Christ day would have been Aramaic however Greek was also another
common language especially in areas of business and commerce.