I knew it had something to do with the fact that the Septuagint was in Greek, not Hebrew and that, at the time the Jews were deciding their Canon, they had some sort of identity crisis with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.įrom what I learned way back when, their whole world was centered on the Temple. Most Jews in fact, used the LXX for their Scriptures, rather than the Hebrew original, Hebrew having become a scholar’s language several hundred years earlier during the Babylonian Captivity.Įsau: aggressive de-helenization in subsequent centuries AD, basically. It is the same as the koine text that we have today. There’s that section of a codex of Matthew that had to have been written between 12-17 years of the Passion to demonstrate that. The Pesshita is a translation from the Greek into the Syriac dialect of Aramaic, not an intact Palestinian Aramaic text.Įven Matthew haLevi wrote in Greek, in spite of claims to the contrary due to the more Jewish characteristics of the Gospel. Thus, to go to a hypothesized verbal Aramaic original in order to try to prove some theological point is severely flawed for historical and theological reasons. That -is- the divine original, not the hypothesized Aramaic which may or may not have been spoken. They might speak Spanish as well as English at home, but English in the work-a-day world.Ģ) The Holy Spirit inspired, verbally, the apostles and their amanuenses to write the didaskalia in Greek. Sort of like recent immigrant Hispanics in the US. This attempt to go back to the (presumed) Aramaic behind the Greek originals ignores several facts.ġ) The Jews, and the Galileans in particular were bilingual in Greek and Aramaic. Thus you can see how "Abun dbashmaya" translates as "Our Father, who art in heaven." The prefix b- (sometimes followed by a vowel, sometimes not) is the Aramaic equivalent of "in" (remember the in/on discussion we had recently?), so bashmaya means "in heaven." And the prefix d- is the Aramaic equivalent of "who," "which," or "that." Dbashmaya thus means "who (is) in heaven." (Aramaic sometimes omits the verb "to be," as it does here.) The Aramaic word for "heaven" is shmaya, and you can see that in the second word of the prayer.
In Aramaic, pronouns often take the form of suffixes on the ends of words, and the suffix -un is a pronoun suffix that means "our." When you stick -un on Abba, you get "Abun," meaning "Our Father." As you know, one of the Aramaic words for "father" (there are actually several variants) is Abba, which is just spelled ABA in Aramaic (it being understood that the B reduplicates in pronunciation). The "Our Father" part of it is just the first word: Abun. But in Aramaic "Abun Dbashmaya" means more than just "Our Father." This is similar to the way we call it the Our Father after it’s first two words. The prayer is often called the Abun Dbashmaya in Aramaic, which are its first two words. I can’t go through the whole prayer line by line right now, but some folks might find it interesting to understand a little of how the language works. For example, on the third line from the bottom in the Aramaic column, you’ll see the word Malkutha ("Mal-koo-tha"), which means "Kingdom," but Kingdom is on the fourth line from the bottom in the English column. Because of word division and length, the lines don’t match up exactly.
One word of warning about the above: What’s on the Aramaic transliteration line doesn’t always match up to exactly what’s on the English line. For example, the first word of the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic is Abun, which will be pronounced by some groups as "Ah-boon," others as "Ah-woon," and still others (as in the transliteration below) as "Ah-voon."
Bear in mind that the English and the Aramaic pronunciation runs left-to-right, while the Aramaic script itself runs right-to-left.Īlso bear in mind that the pronunciation the prayer is given in Aramaic will vary from one group of speakers to another, based on accent. The translation they gave of the Aramaic into English was completely wrong, so I decided just to print the text of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.įirst, though, here’s an audio file of it (.wav format):Īfter doing a little digging around, I found the following nice image, which contains the prayer in English and the Aramaic alphabet, with an Aramaic pronounciation also. Unfortunately, after the show, a closer inspection of the site showed it to be kooky to the extreme. Unfortunately, the address of the site I had was too long, so I promised to put it up on the blog this morning. I mentioned that it’s found in the Pshitta, an Aramaic translation of Scripture, and it’s also available online. Yesterday there was a caller on the show who wanted to know about finding the Our Father in Aramaic.
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