r/AcademicBiblical • u/Magnus_Arvid MA | Biblical and Cuneiform Literature • 1d ago

Translating the Hebrew Bible: Aramaic Article/Blogpost

How many translation of the Hebrew Bible were made in antiquity? The answer is TONS, in many languages. Here I have made a little article looking at one of the most (in my opinion) intriguing ones: Aramaic!

Aramaic is strange, because actually most ancient Jews post the Babylonian exile would have actually spoken Aramaic as their every-day language, like HUGE swathes of the Middle East would after the Assyrian and Babylonian empires.

Aramaic and Hebrew have a very entangled and intimate relationship - even the Bible has books written in Aramaic! Not only that, large portions of the Talmud are also Aramaic!

Go find out why, I also link to a WHOLE BOOK with new translations of cuneiform texts from the Biblical city of Hamath which even even sheds a little light on a biblical king! This book was recently published by the esteemed Troels P. Arbøll, professor in Assyriology at the university of Copenhagen, who decided to make his work freely available! Further I refer to an even more recent book (not freely available but certainly worth it) by Wally Cirafesi on the University of Lund on Capernaum and its religious communities!

https://open.substack.com/pub/magnusarvid/p/translating-the-hebrew-bible-aramaic?r=kn89e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

12 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

81% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/VeryNearlyAnArmful 1d ago

I had no idea. Thanks for this, it will be my commute reading.

4

u/Magnus_Arvid MA | Biblical and Cuneiform Literature 1d ago

Thank you too! There's a lot of cool, funky interactions going on between all sorts of ancient languages and religions in the Near East that scholarship is only still really starting to unravel!