Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>]

Dear Yigal,

> RE: [b-hebrew] Aramaic - AbbaOf course, you read the words of Jesus, 
> as recorded by the evangelists. Assuming that your Greek is good 
> enough to get "behind" the translations and to get a "feel" for the 
> text in Greek, the question of whether Mark intended for Jesus' cry 
> to be formal or not is still more a literary question than a 
> historical one.


HH: One thought that occurs to me is that Jesus elsewhere in the 
gospels seems to speak Aramaic rather than Hebrew where there are 
speech fragments in a language other than Greek. That suggests ABBA 
was Aramaic, and thus according to what has been said would have 
meant "father." If that is the case, then the Greek NT translation of 
ABBA as "father" would make sense.

                                        Yours,
                                        Harold Holmyard