Nadene Goldfoot
"There seems to be a misconception that Aramaic isn't a Jewish language. The Talmud is largely composed in Aramaic, with the exception of the Mishnah which is written in Early Rabbinic Hebrew. There are also the Targums, or Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible as well as the Jastrow Aramaic Dictionary, all of these can be accessed on the Sefaria database of Jewish texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls are in Aramaic and even parts of the Hebrew Tanakh contain Aramaic phrases and words. The books of Daniel and Ezra are mostly composed in Aramaic.
Some traditions even argue that Aramaic was the language of the patriarchs, even though evidence suggests that Abraham in particular probably would have spoken Akkadian since neither Hebrew nor Aramaic existed back then." Aramaic originated in the ancient region of Syria, and quickly spread to Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia where it has been continually written and spoken, in different varieties, for over three thousand years. Several modern varieties, the Neo-Aramaic languages, are still spoken by Assyrians, and some Mandeans and Mizrahi Jews (Jews that never left the Middle East).
Mandaeans are a closed ethno-religious community, practicing Mandaeism, which is a monotheistic, Gnostic, and ethnic religion (Aramaic manda means "knowledge," and is conceptually related to the Greek term gnosis.) Its adherents revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist.
There are people who have used the Syriac Script since the 1st Century CE. The Syriac alphabet writing system was used by the Syriac Christians from the 1st century CE until about the 14th century. A
Both the top and underneath are Hebrew
Modern Hebrew alphabet
It was used by the Jews, (but not the Samaritans).
The Samaritans have continued to use this
Jews adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. (The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew). The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels.
Using Hebrew letters to write Aramaic This portion of the Book of Daniel was written in Aramaic which is very difficult to translate into another language. The writer uses a strange word for serve. The word in Aramaic is palak which in a noun form means a millstone. In its verbal form it means to grind or cut up into pieces. It is possible that what King Darius is referring to is Daniel’s fanaticism, the God that you have ground yourself up into or maybe, the God who has ground you up into little pieces
Certain portions of the Bible—i.e., the books of Daniel and Ezra—are written in Aramaic, as are the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Among the Jews, Aramaic was used by the common people, while Hebrew remained the language of religion and government and of the upper class. Though only about 1% of the Hebrew Bible is written in Aramaic, those are some important passages.
Hebrew and Aramaic are also languages used in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of nearly a thousand manuscripts discovered in caves in the Judaean Desert during the middle of the 20th century. About 80% of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew, and about 17% of them are written in Aramaic. There are also a few which are written in Greek.
Jesus and the Apostles are believed to have spoken Aramaic, and Aramaic-language translations (Targums) of the Old Testament circulated. Aramaic continued in wide use until about 650 CE, when it was supplanted by Arabic.
The Aramaic language is connected to a historical region named Aram (Syria) where the Arameans lived. One of the main kingdoms in the region, Aram-Damascus was centered around the city of Damascus which is now the capital of Syria. When the region of Aram was conquered by the Assyrians around the 8th century BC, resettlements caused the Aramaic language to spread. This led Aramaic to gradually become an international language, spoken in many parts of the near east. Today, there are still some forms of Aramaic that are spoken in parts of the middle east. But these modern varieties of Aramaic are considered to be endangered languages because they are not widely spoken.
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was adapted by Arameans from the Phoenician alphabet and became a distinct script by the 8th century BC. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes—a precursor to Arabization centuries later—including among Assyrians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script.
The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. In other words, Aramaic was as commonly used as English is in today's world.
Josephus, alive in 70 CE, the Jewish general taken by the Romans who wrote for them, originally wrote them all in Greek, but the Latin translations became extremely popular and influential during the Middle Ages. One can presume that Greek was becoming equally as popular as Aramaic. After annexation by the Romans in 106 CE, most of Nabataea was subsumed into the province of Arabia Petraea, and the Nabataeans turned to Greek for written ...
The first Latin translation was printed as early as 1470.
Resource:
https://www.quora.com/If-Jesus-was-a-Jew-why-did-he-speak-Aramaic-instead-of-Hebrew
Haim Goldfus paper in Acadamia...The Syriac Inscriptions....
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://www.chaimbentorah.com/2018/05/hebrew-word-study-aramaic-continually-serve/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aramaic-language
https://vocab.chat/blog/aramaic-and-hebrew.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet
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