Home	Our Hope
Bible Study		December 27, 2015
The Lord's Prayer as he Spoke It

Introduction

As you've probably guessed from the title, the topic for this study will have something to do with the Lord's prayer. In fact we'll be looking at it in the language that Jesus spoke it. But first we have to answer the question, "What language did Jesus speak?"

If you've watched the movie "The Passion of the Christ" by Mel Gibson, you noticed they didn't speak English, but you may not have known the language most of them were speaking. In that movie the Romans spoke among themselves in Latin, the language of Rome, but when they spoke with Jesus and the Jews, they used a different language.

Lesson

Jesus and the people from that area spoke a language we call Aramaic, but knowing that doesn't tell us much. To understand what Aramaic is, we'll use an example from the English language. Here is the Lord's Prayer from Matt. 6:9-13 in English.

Fęder ure žu že eart on heofonum
Si žin nama gehalgod
to becume žin rice
gewurže šin willa
on eoršan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedęghwamlican hlaf syle us todęg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfaš urum gyltendum
and ne gelęd žu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele sožlice¹

You can't read it because it's Old English. Old English was a language that branched off from the German language as it mixed in other languages and changed over time. Even so, if you look closely, you can recognize features in the first line when it is directly translated to a more modern English.

Father our thou that art in heavens²

Old English was used from about 450 A.D. to 1100 A.D. and slowly changed into what we now call Middle English, which continued until about 1500 A.D, the time of Martin Luther. Then came Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. That lasted until about 1650 A.D. and changed into the Modern English we now speak.

I'm telling you this so that you will understand that all languages change over time. New words are added, old words removed, pronunciations change, and existing words get new meanings or lose old ones. Even characters of their alphabets are added and removed. Name a change in English

Just as modern English developed slowly from Old English, the Aramaic language developed slowly out of Hebrew. Hebrew was the language used for most of the books of the Old Testament. But by the last few books the text was more like Aramaic than Hebrew. A branch from the Aramaic would eventually develop into the Arabic language used in the Koran and later on into Modern Arabic.

Aramaic was a widespread language in Jesus' time. "Aramaic gradually became the [common language] of most of Western Asia and Egypt."³ A common language is a language that a mixture of language groups uses to communicate with each other, even though it might not be the language they learned at birth. What language is the common language today?

Around 700 A.D. Aramaic was mostly replaced by Arabic. There are still about 2,000,000 people who speak Aramaic in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. And there are still Christian churches in that area which worship in Aramaic.

Beside Aramaic being the common language at the time and also the language the Jews learned from birth, we know Jesus spoke Aramaic because a few of the things he said are quoted in the Bible in Aramaic. One of these comes from Matthew 27:45, where we see a transcription (sounding like the words) of Jesus' last words from the cross. In the NIV, this appears as "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani"⁴

Accents

I had two friends who spoke with British accents. I was there when they first met and spoke a few sentences back and forth. Each instantly knew the city where the other was born. Yet they hadn't talked about where they had been born. How

This was possible because, in any language there are always geographic areas that develop variations of the language called dialects. Just as the U.S. has Texan, Californian, Bostonian, and other dialects, Britain also had dialects. But in their case you could travel just 30 miles down the road and move from one dialect to another. These small dialect areas were the result of limited travel. Most people lived and died within 30 miles of where they were born. So it was possible to know where a person was born by the dialect they spoke.

So it was in Jesus' time. Many people believe Jesus would have spoken the Galilean dialect of Aramaic, though it's likely that he always retained a hint of some Egyptian dialect because of his early years there.

Memory Aids

In ancient times people didn't write very much. Paper was rare and expensive. Also, you couldn't just whip out a Bic© pen and start writing. Most people didn't have the skills to write, which included making and shaping your own pen and sometimes making your own ink. As a result there were professional scribes, people you would hire to do the writing for you.

The result of not writing much was using memory more. From birth they learned to memorize things they needed to know such as the stories of their families, and their genealogy. They also memorized important parts of books and scriptures because they could not afford to have their own copies.

With the need to memorize so much more than most of us do today, they developed techniques to help them remember. Medical students today have the same need. They must learn the names of all the bones, muscles, and organs of the body and each of the parts of those. They use the same kind of memory techniques that ancient people used. One of these techniques is rhyming. If the information you need to remember can be put into a rhyme it is easier to remember. In addition to helping with memorization, a rhyme and its meter help to confirm that you've recalled it correctly. If your recollection doesn't rhyme or the meter isn't right, you know you've forgotten something.

The Sound of Aramaic

To show you what Aramaic sounds like, we'll use the Lord's Prayer as an example. In the left column below is a transcription of the Aramaic. In this case that means English characters and pronunciation rules are used to show how something would sound. For example, names from other languages, like Taliban, are created by transcription. In the right column is a direct word-for-word translation of the Aramaic into English.

Note that the Lord's Prayer rhymes in Aramaic. The rhyming syllables are highlighted in alternating colors.

Voice

The MP3 below is the Lord's Prayer spoken the way the Galilean dialect of Aramaic may have sounded. It's impossible to know for sure exactly what it sounded like. But whether this is exactly the same or as different as Jamaican English is to our ears, there is no doubt that Jesus and his disciples would have been able to understand it.

As you listen to it notice that the sound is similar to the Arabic we sometimes hear Muslims speaking. That's because Arabic is a descendent of Aramaic. Also, try to follow along with the speaker by using the transliteration above.

Conclusion

We've learned a little about the language that Jesus used when he spoke and prayed, Galilean Aramaic. And we've learned that Aramaic developed out of the Hebrew language that is used for most of the books of the Old Testament.

We also learned a little about the lives of people at that time and how they communicated.

Questions?

¹ http://www.angelfire.com/la2/timeline/OEnglish.html

² http://www.angelfire.com/la2/timeline/OEnglish.html

³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language

⁴ http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2027&version=NIV

⁵ http://aramaicnttruth.org/downloads/outside/8_Contradictions.pdf