Aramaic: A History of the First World Language (Eerdmans Language Resources (ELR)) Hardcover – May 27, 2021

An approachable history of Aramaic- one of the oldest languages still in use

Good resource for a language student or library.

As its subtitle suggests, Holger Gzella wants to convince you that Aramaic is the first “world language,” a lingua franca and shared administrative language of the ancient Near East. He argues correctly that scholars have overlooked its importance, seeing Aramaic mostly in terms of other languages and cultures – the Aramaic chapters of the Hebrew books of Daniel and Ezra, for example, or isolated phrases and sentences in the Christian Bible. Gzella argues for a different view. He sees Aramaic as a “binding agent” in the ancient world, at least through the early centuries of the Arab conquest. He makes a convincing case.The history of Aramaic begins about 1000 BCE. It is a northwest Semitic language from Aram, roughly coinciding with the Syrian Desert. It appears in many dialects or varieties, including the “Syriac” of Syriac Christianity and Biblical Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible (especially Daniel 2-6). It also appears in phrases and two sentences in the Christian Bible (“Talitha, cumi” and “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?”), each in two slightly different forms (“koum” or “Eli, eli,” respecively).Western studies of Aramaic developed in the fields of Biblical Studies and Semitic studies in the 16th century as Protestants sought to understand the original texts of Scripture. Protestant Germany retains a very strong tradition of Semitic studies, leading to the joke that German is the most important Semitic language. The field developed a more secular offshoot in 19th century linguistics. These linguistic studies moved the field from seeing only “Jewish Aramaic” and “Christian Aramaic” toward a modern classification and family tree for the language family.After reviewing those intellectual origins of the field, Gzella follows Aramaic through history. He begins with the standardization of the chancery language in several princedoms in Syria before it becomes the language of administration of three empires: the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. After that, scribes standardized a form of Aramaic that becomes a literary language seen in the court scenes of Daniel and Ezra.After carrying the Aramaic story through the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Gzella switches to a more cultural approach to the regional varieties of Aramaic. These are often associated with various religious groups that still exist today, with some languages differentiated by Jewish and Christian dialects in a single place. Gzella sees this differentiation as analogous to Jewish and Italian variants of the New York City dialect of English, with cultural or religious subgroups taking different paths..In the final two chapters, Gzella reviews the small role of Aramaic in Islamic culture before concluding with an overview of modern Aramaic dialects. He loses the thread of the story as the thread itself unravels. No longer a major language, Aramaic becomes a cluster of dialects that continue to divide into smaller local variants. This makes each variant vulnerable to extinction, and these dialects continue to die out.Because he is particularly interested in how people used Aramaic, Gzella emphasizes the language’s cultural context through history; phrased differently, this is not a history of its phonetics or grammar. Gzella’s decision will make the book more interesting to a wider range of readers.While the book’s most likely audience outside academics will be students of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity who want to understand the context of Jewish and Christian scripture, Gzella regularly argues that Classicists and other scholars should also study the history of Aramaic. For example, he believes that scholars of the ancient world should add Aramaic to the other languages in their repertoire.This recommendation faces organizational challenges that will be familiar to anyone who works at a university. Throughout the book, Gzella shows that there is no academic tradition of Aramaic studies. Instead, scholars have learned it to translate Aramaic texts to illuminate other fields, such as Hebrew or Arabic studies.Gzella hopes to change this. He wants to encourage foundational work on Aramaic that can contribute to biblical studies, ancient Mediterranean history, general linguistics, and other fields. He has learned significant parts of these other fields and his book shows remarkable learning across languages, religious, and cultures. He also demonstrates considerable familiarity with the texts from many periods and dialects. It is no surprise that he holds a major chair in Germany.This is a fascinating and important book but it is not for the casual reader. Gzella writes for a wide audience that is comfortable reading academic books, and I can imagine assigning it to upper-division undergraduate students. He explains terms when he introduces them, but you will need to remember what they mean (or use the index). His translator has done an excellent job in using English and American parallels to replace Dutch or German illustrations Gzella uses in the original – as in my example of NYC dialects above. If you find this kind of accessible scholarship congenial, I heartily recommend it.