Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

>===== Original Message From Dean Young <Dean.Young AT CDA.CenterPartners.com> 
=====
>I
>ran across Aramaic as well and kind of started learning that a little on the
>side and it was really interesting...however, I was wondering which would be
>beneficial to learn first, or that might aid in learning the other?
>
I would generally approach them separately. Don't try to treat one as 
dependent on the other. Some of the answer to your question depends on your 
interests. Both Hebrew and Aramaic can be of interest to different kinds of 
people for different reasons. If you're interested in Talmud, you'll need to 
know Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Rabbinic Hebrew. If you're interested in 
biblical studies, you'll need to know Biblical Hebrew and Standard Literary 
Aramaic. If you're interested in Christian Literature, you'll want to deal 
with Syriac (an Aramaic dialect). If you're interested in modern languages, 
you'll want to learn Israeli Hebrew and perhaps one of the living Aramaic 
dialects (which are all minority languages, many near-death).

Since this is a list for Biblical Hebrew, I'll assume that your interest is 
in 
the area of biblical languages. Obviously, more of the biblical literature is 
written in Hebrew than in Aramaic, although if you're interested in the 
Hebrew 
Bible as part of either Christian or Jewish tradition, you could benefit from 
learning Jewish Aramaic for its significance in New Testament studies or in 
traditional Jewish literature. Keep in mind, though, that even if your 
primary 
interest in Aramaic is for biblical material, you should study more Aramaic 
than what you find in the Bible. Some approaches to learning Aramaic will not 
suggest this. You will find grammars that address so-called Biblical Aramaic 
in isolation. There are at least two major problems with this approach. One 
is 
that BA is not uniform. There are differences between the Aramaic of Ezra and 
Daniel, which makes the category of BA problematic. The other problem is that 
all stripes of BA fit into a broader context of Standard Literary Aramaic 
that 
can be helpful in providing a more complete picture. (This would include the 
Aramaic of the biblical material, Qumran Aramaic texts, and early Targums. 
There are others, but these are the major players in the Jewish variety.) But 
even once you've broadened your study to this material, you'll probably want 
to explore Official Aramaic, which is the written standard dialect from the 
Persian empire on which SLA is based, found primarily in legal documents and 
correspondence. If you get into the issues of trying to place texts 
geographically (i.e., to identify regional features that creep into the 
Aramaic of particular texts), you'll want to familiarize yourself with the 
later literary dialects--Jewish Babylonian (Talmudic) Aramaic and Mandaic in 
the East; Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, and Samaritan Aramaic in 
the West; Syriac probably somewhere in between. And if all that doesn't keep 
you busy enough, there are the Old Aramaic inscriptions that precede Official 
Aramaic and the modern Aramaic dialects.

Of course, you can get carried away in some similar respects with the study 
of 
Hebrew as well. BH, epigraphic material, Rabbinic Hebrew, Medieval Hebrew, 
Israeli Hebrew all have their value. But because the BA corpus is so small, I 
think there's more incentive to go outside the corpus. For that matter, I 
think it's inexcusable not to. Still, if your interest is primarily in BA, 
it's probably best to get a good grounding in BH first. The reason is that at 
least in its present form (as we find it in the MT), BA is influenced 
somewhat 
by BH.
>
>My other question is how closely related is Aramaic and Arabic? and hebrew?

Arabic is very much its own language, but it can be quite helpful for 
understanding other Semitic languages like Aramaic and Hebrew. For one thing, 
you can learn Modern Arabic as a spoken language with a longer living 
tradition in common use than in Israeli Hebrew. Also, Arabic (particularly 
the 
classical form based on the Qur'an) seems to preserve some archaic features 
that other Semitic languages have lost. So it can be helpful in getting a 
picture of the history of the language family. (You do have to realize, 
though, that over time Arabic has developed some very specialized meanings 
for 
cognate terms found in other languages.) Arabic is also important for the 
history of Hebrew grammar, since the earliest grammars of Hebrew were written 
in an Arabic-speaking environment, under the influence of Arabic grammarians. 
On the flip-side, Arabic inherited some significant elements from its contact 
with Aramaic early in the Islamic period.

Of course, what you really need to do is get into a good Semitics program 
where you can study all of these languages in depth; I'll put in a shameless 
plug for the program I'm in, since it not only has good opportunities for 
studying BH and SLA, but you can also interact fully with the late antique 
side of the department and learn Arabic and Syriac (in fact, working across 
the disciplines is encouraged). Short of that, I'd probably keep plugging 
away 
at BH for now and dive into Aramaic once you start to feel a bit more 
comfortable.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics