To this day, Assyrians and Chaldeans still speak the Aramaic language not only in Kurdistan, Iraq and other areas of the Near East but also in the United States and in different countries. However, the younger generation in the United States is l osing their mother tongue. This was the language that Jesus and his disciples spoke throughout Galilee. It became the vernacular of northern Palestine long before the Chaldean captivity because the area had been repopulated with Assyrians brought from Edess a and other regions beyond the Euphrates. In 721 B.C.E., the Assyrians carried away the ten tribes of Israel into Nineveh and scattered them throughout Mesopotamia (Northern Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan). Hebrew was almost completely lost as a language. Jews in northern Mesopotamia, Kurdistan and Persia still speak and pray in an Aramaic dialect known as Leshana Galoth, “the language of captivity.” The dialect spoken in Persia (Iran) is related to the Chaldean or Southern Aramaic. 2 Such a change was inevitable. Aramaic had long before become the language of the Near East. The Edessan dialect was the lingua franca and all literary works were written in this tongue. This was largely due to the long continued influence and power of the Assyrian Empire. Even after the fall of Assyria, the Chaldeans and Persians used this language for purposes of commerce a nd communications. There were other Aramaic dialects such as Western (Syriac), Chaldean and Hebrew, but these dialects were chiefly used in speech and had only a local interest. The Jews and Syrians could not have engaged in commerce and diplomacy without the knowledge of northern Aramaic. The high officials of King Hezekiah requested that the ambassador of the Assyrian king speak to them in Aramaic.4 This occurs today in situations where there are many dialects in a language and the most expressive of them is used for literary and commercial purposes. Palestine was a small country and its inhabitants were chiefly herdsmen. Their vocabulary was limited to their local needs. The smallness of the Palestinian kingdoms is illustrated by the fact that its subjects sought the advice of their rulers in business and other practical affairs. For example, Saul sought the advice of the prophet Samuel in locating his father’s lost donkeys. At that time, Samuel was the ruler in Israel. Solomon’s wisdom and judgment were sought to decide on the parentage of an infant .
However, this was not the case in the great empires of Assyria, Chaldea and Persia. The kings of these kingdoms were worshiped as deities and the common people could not approach them. In these ancient lands, a high civilization existed thousands of ye ars before the arrival of the Hebrew patriarch, Abraham. Aramaic was, at that time, a literary language; Hammurabi’s code of law was written in that language. During and after the exile, the Jews made extensive use of this language. Josephus and other writer s also wrote in Aramaic.
Aramaic has continued to the present day with some slight variations between the written and the spoken forms. There is no such thing as modem Aramaic. Language is a process and cannot be invented in a day or night. Differences exist between the literary and the vernacular because writers, in the process of time, improve and beautify the written language while the colloquial remains more or less in its original form. The vernacular of any language is, therefore, the older form. For instance, when t he people of Anatolia, who speak Turkish, go to Constantinople or Ankara, they are not able to understand clearly the Turkish speech that the people use there. This is because the people of Constantinople and Ankara borrow many of their expressions from Arab ic and European languages. It is indisputable that Aramaic has continued unchanged to the present day. The greatest evidence in support of this is that the same Aramaic words retained in the Greek version of the New Testament are still in use both in the vernacular and written forms of the language. It is significant that all Aramaic literature, from the earliest centuries to the present time, is wri tten without the slightest variation. This is further illustrated by the maintenance of the ancient customs as well as the c ostumes worn by the Assyrian people in Kurdistan. There is an amazing similarity, as shown in the clay tablets made centuries before Christ, between the Assyrian ancestors in the facial likeness and head gear and that of the present day Assyrian.
ARAMAIC AND GREEK ALPHABETS
The Greeks also borrowed their alphabet from the Near East. Its characters still retain the original Semitic names and, to some extent, the original forms that were derived from Semitic objects. A few examples: the first letter, alpha—Greek, alep—Aramaic, is an Assyrian word for ox and the character A represents the head of an ox. The ox was an Assyrian god; the first letter in the Aramaic word for “God,” Alaha, is alep—“a.” The second character, beta—Greek, beth—Aramaic, is the Aramaic letter B which resembles the structure of a one-room, ancient Assyrian house. The Greeks divided the shape of the letter in two because the Greeks had two-story houses. Gamma—Greek, gamal—Aramaic, is the third letter G. In Aramaic it resembles a camel’s hump or saddle. There are twenty two letters in the Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets. It was this alphabet that entered Europe via Greece.
Even the Armenians, who are recognized as one of the ancient Christian people, used the Aramaic alphabet and language in Church services from the second century to 500 c.E., when Mesrop invented the present Armenian alphabet. Previous to the fifth century, Armenian Christianity was closely allied to the Assyrian Church. Many of its leaders and writers were Assyrians. The Armenian Church continued using the Near Eastern Aramaic Scriptures until the Monophysite controversy; then for political reasons, the Armenian Church became allied with the Church in the Byzantine Empire.