chapter 3 Judeo-

Steven E. Fassberg

1 Introduction 64 2 Judeo-Aramaic and Contact between Hebrew and Aramaic 65 3 Judeo-Aramaic at Elephantine (5th Century BCE) 67 4 Biblical Aramaic 67 5 Judeo-Aramaic Alphabet 68 6 Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls 69 7 Legal Documents and Letters between the First and Second Jewish Revolts against the Romans 70 8 Targums Onqelos and Jonathan 72 9 Standard Literary Aramaic 74 10 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic—First 76 11 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic—Second Stratum 81 12 Jewish Palestinian Aramaic—Third Stratum 85 13 Jewish Babylonian Aramaic 89 14 Two Notable Medieval Judeo-Aramaic Compositions 96 14.1 The Zohar 96 14.2 Ḥad Gadya 98 15 Jewish Neo-Aramaic 100 16 Further Study 106 17 Bibliography 108

1 Introduction

Aramaic is the only Semitic language for which there is evidence of con- tinuous, uninterrupted speech since the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Arameans are first mentioned in Akkadian cuneiform sources during the reign of Tiglath Pileser I (1115–1077BCE), where they are located along the banks of the Upper and, over time, spread westward into - Palestine and eastward into modern-day Iraq (Lipiński 2000). The oldest Ara- maic texts written in the North Semitic alphabetic script are dated to the 9th–8th centuries and have been found in archaeological digs in southeastern

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004297357_005 judeo-aramaic 65

Turkey, northern Syria, and northern ; they are attested in Iraq and Iran at a slightly later period. Aramaic was gradually adopted by Akkadian and other speakers in Mesopo- tamia and Syria during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods (ca. 1000–600BCE). The resulting symbiosis of Akkadian and Aramaic is attested in bilingual dockets, Aramaic in Akkadian and Akkadian loanwords in Aramaic, and the bilingual Akkadian-Aramaic Fekheriyye stele. The Ara- maic language spread with the increasing movement of the Aramean tribes, and as a result, after conquering the Babylonians in 550BCE, the Achaemenid Persian Empire chose to use Aramaic as an official language of administration. Papyri and ostraca from this period have shown up in , Arabia, Pales- tine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Anatolia, Armenia, Georgia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Bilingual inscriptions have been discovered at Sardis (Lydian-Aramaic), Limyra (Aramaic-Greek), Armazi (Greek-Aramaic), and Kandahar (Greek-Aramaic). began to displace Aramaic as a only a thousand years later after Islam swept over the Near East during the 7th century CE. Since then, the number of Aramaic speakers has dwindled steadily. In the first half of the 20th century, only isolated pockets of speakers remained in the . Today, most native speakers live outside the Aramaic-speaking homeland in which they and their immediate forbears were born, because of political and religious persecution. Aramaic is divided into five chronological periods (Fitzmyer 1979): Old Ara- maic (925BCE–700BCE), which is attested in inscriptions from Syria, northern Israel, and ; Official Aramaic (or Imperial Aramaic, i.e., the lan- guage of administration of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, also commonly known as Reichsaramäisch; 700BCE–200BCE); Middle Aramaic (200BCE– 300CE), represented by Nabatean, Palmyrene, Hatran, the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Aramaic found in the New Testament; Late Aramaic (200CE– 700CE), known from Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian, and Samari- tan Aramaic in the West (Syria-Palestine), Syriac in the center (southeastern Turkey), and Jewish Babylonian and Mandean Aramaic in the East (Iraq and Iran); and Modern Aramaic (also known as Neo-Aramaic), which is separated into western, central, and northeastern dialectal groups.

2 Judeo-Aramaic and between Hebrew and Aramaic

The term Judeo-Aramaic may be applied to the varieties of Aramaic used by Jews in different periods and in different areas. Unlike the Aramaic that was and