Learn to Read Ancient Aramaic: E. Cook (2022), Chapter One, “Introduction: Aramaic and Its Dialects”

Introduction

This post is the first in a series that provides a resource to learn or review the contents of Edward M. Cook’s Biblical Aramaic and Related Dialects: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Each blog in the series will cover a single chapter in Cook’s grammar. We seek to provide here a summary of the contents of each chapter without reproducing too much of Cook’s material. The ultimate hope is that the reader’s interest will be piqued and curiosity sparked so that (s)he will pursue further study of the Aramaic language and literature on their own.

Ed Cook is the Ordinary Professor of Semitic Languages at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and a specialist in Aramaic dialects, especially of Middle Aramaic and that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The grammar itself situates Biblical Aramaic in its dialectological context by describing it in the context of the elements it shares with older Imperial Aramaic as well as its near-contemporary counterpart, Qumran Aramaic. It contains, therefore, a grammatical description and readings from all three dialects. This first blog covers chapter one–“Introduction: Aramaic and Its Dialects”–and contains seven sections, from the beginnings of Aramaic to the tools necessary for its research.

N.b., for the remainder of the blog, the following abbreviations are used: OA for Old Aramaic; IA for Imperial Aramaic; BA for Biblical Aramaic; QA for Qumran Aramaic; MA for Middle Aramaic; and Aram. for Aramaic.

Beginnings of Aramaic

A knowledge of Aram. language and literature is of central importance for the study of the ancient world, a “key that opens many doors” (p. 1). Aram. is a member of the Northwest Semitic branch of languages, along with Hebrew, Phoenician, Ugaritic, and other dialects, and was spoken in a number of small kingdoms located in and around modern-day Syria. Having adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians, what remains from the earliest OA period are inscriptions on stone monuments.

Imperial Aramaic

Aram. became the default language of wider communication during the Persian Achaemenid dynasty (538-331 BCE) and thus its documentation from this period increases dramatically. IA became “a somewhat simplified compromise between dialects, that is, a koine” which was primarily influenced by the Eastern dialects (p. 3). Cook summarizes eleven of most important changes that took place in IA, for example the use of the Eastern preposition ל as the marker of the definite direct object (over against Western אית). As a prestige language, it also influenced surrounding languages like Hebrew, Akkadian, and Iranian languages.

In the remainder of this section, Cook provides a helpful overview of the documentation which survives from the Imperial Aramaic period, including the Elephantine papyri, the Arshama letters, Hermopolis papyri, and Aram. texts in non-alphabetic script (Papyrus Amherst 63 in Demotic script and the Uruk incantation in syllabic cuneiform).

Aramaic in the Jewish Community After the Exile

Jews encountered Aram. in the kingdom of Judah already by the 8th cent. BCE but especially during the exile in the Babylonian empire and subsequently during the Persian period. This is reflected in its incorporation into the biblical texts (e.g. Jer. 10:11) as well as influence on the “Late Biblical Hebrew” language itself (e.g. loanwords). For example, the canonical book of Ezra contains long sections in Aram. with an updated orthography and morphology to reflect later norms.

After Imperial Aramaic

Aram. was dethroned as the official language of empire with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Near East. However, Aram. lived on in a number of regional dialects during the period called “Middle Aramaic” (see Fitzmyer 1979). The MA dialects of the Hellenistic and Roman periods are characterized by linguistic complexity and fluidity. The subsequent acquisition of Hebrew by the Aramaic-speaking population of Judea during the Hasmonean period led to the formation of Middle Hebrew (i.e. Mishnaic and rabbinic Hebrew).

Biblical and Qumran Aramaic

The consonantal text of the Aram. portions of the Book of Daniel (2:4b-7:28) was likely composed during the 2nd cent. BCE. Chapters 2-6 relate the story of Daniel and his friends in the context of the Babylonian court during the 6th cent. BCE, while ch. 7 presents a symbolic vision of Daniel. Linguistically, it contains traits that are both similar to and different from IA. For example, on the one hand, the preformative of the C-stem suffix conj., impv., and infv. is still h- rather than ˀaleph; on the other hand, consonantal mergers are fully reflected in the orthography without historical spellings.

The Aram. texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are mainly products of the 1st cent. BCE and CE. Over 100 of the 800 or so scrolls were written in Aram. The most important Aram. documents, described in further detail in Cook’s grammar, are as follows: the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen); the Targum of Job (11QtgJob); fragments of the Book of I Enoch (4Q201-202, 4Q204-207, 4Q212) and Astronomical Enoch (4Q208-211); fragments of the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit (4Q196-199); the Aramaic Levi Document (1Q21, 4Q213, 4Q213a–b, 4Q214, 4Q214a–b); the Testament of Kohath (4Q542); the Visions of Amram (4Q543-549); the Testament of Jacob (4Q537); the Testament of Judah (4Q538); a visionary Description of the New Jerusalem (1Q32, 2Q24, 4Q554, 4Q554a, 4Q555, 5Q15, 11Q18); etc. Linguistically, while QA is very similar to BA, Cook comments on six orthographic, seven morphological, two syntactic, and two lexical characteristics worthy of mention. While QA has generally drifted further away from IA than BA, overall the three dialects exhibit a considerable degree of uniformity among them.

A third corpus of texts worth considering briefly are those written in Jewish Literary Aramaic, notably the production of the targums after the Second Temple period. The most famous of these were Targum Onqelos and Targum Jonathan. While not included in the grammar, the pronunciation tradition of these texts is known through a full vocalization system using vowel points similar to the Masoretic pointing of BA texts, and thus provides valuable knowledge about ancient Aram. from a slightly later period.

Tools for Research

This section of the chapter discusses bibliographical details with regard to the necessary research tools for the study of the relevant Aram. dialects, including text editions, dictionaries and other lexical resources, grammars, and concordances. We highlight here just a few. For writings on OA, IA, and BA up to 1992, see Fitzmyer and Kaufman, An Aramaic Bibliography. On QA, a bibliography is available on the website of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as Fitzmyer’s A guide to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature (2008). For quick (and free) access to the texts, a lexicon, and further bibliography, see the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project website.

N.b., Cook himself has a number of relevant publications, some of which are listed in his bibliography. These include, inter alia, his Dictionary of Qumran Aramaic (2015), an article titled “Qumran Aramaic and Aramaic Dialectology” (1992), and a chapter titled “The Aramaic of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after fifty years: A comprehensive assessment (1998). See his academia.edu page here.

Conclusion

In just 18 pages Cook does well to summarize a lot of introductory material related to the study of Aram. and its dialects in the second half of the first millennium BCE and 1st cent. CE. The book fleshes out all the information found in this inaugurating blog series on learning to read ancient Aram. His second chapter, the topic of the following blog post in the series, discusses Aram. orthography.

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