The Aramaic Language of Jesus

By Gabriel Sawma BACKGROUND The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple in 587 BC, by the forces of king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, mark the beginning of what is known as the Babylonian Exile of the Jews. Up to that time, and from the moment of its appearance in a documented written form, the Hebrew language presents, a clear evidence that it belongs to the Canaanite family of languages. This means that when the Israelite tribes settled in the land of Canaan, from the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, they adopted the language of that country (Isa. 19:18). The Hebrew of the poetic sections of the Bible, as well as the oldest epigraphic material in inscriptions dating from the tenth to the sixth centuries BC, is known as Archaic Hebrew. Among t View the rest of this article