{"id":69833,"date":"2020-02-08T10:28:42","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T08:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=69833"},"modified":"2023-09-04T17:01:11","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T14:01:11","slug":"whence-aramaic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/whence-aramaic\/","title":{"rendered":"Whence Aramaic?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thus shall you say to them: Let the gods, who did not make heaven and earth, perish from the earth and from under these heavens (11).<\/span><\/p>\n

This verse is unique in one significant respect: It is in Aramaic, while the rest of the Book of Jeremiah is in Hebrew. Whom Jeremiah was addressing here, and why he did so in Aramaic, naturally intrigued the exegetes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rashi wrote, \u201cThis is a letter that Jeremiah sent to [King] Jehoiachin and the [Jews] in exile to respond to the Chaldeans, in Aramaic, if they were to tell them to worship idols.\u201d Rashi assumed, correctly, that Aramaic was a language understood in Babylonia, although we know that it was not the everyday spoken language (which was Babylonian), but was generally reserved for official use.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We may recall from Isaiah 36 that when the Assyrian Rabshakeh addressed the emissaries of King Hezekiah at the outskirts of Jerusalem, they asked him not to speak in \u201cJudean\u201d (<\/span>Yehudit<\/span><\/em>), which everyone within earshot could understand, but in Aramaic, which was understood by courtiers as it was the \u201clingua franca\u201d of the ancient Near East. Radak concurred, observing that Jeremiah issued a warning against idolatry to the Jews as well, but that Scripture kept it all in Aramaic so as not to have a bilingual verse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shadal*, however, had reservations about their interpretation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rashi and Radak thought that this verse was written in Aramaic because it was a letter Jeremiah sent to the people in exile with Jehoiachin. This would be quite a stretch if he were to incite the people to insult their captors. He told them the opposite: \u201cSeek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you; if it is at peace, so will you be at peace\u201d (29:7). How could he tell them to belittle them with these words, and how could that bring them peace?<\/span><\/p>\n

It appears to me that after saying \u201cnations cannot endure His rage\u201d (10:10), he said that those who served the true God would have no fear of the anger of idols and their worshippers. These [devout] deserved to be addressed forthrightly and in their own language in order to understand that those deities deserved to perish from the earth. In order not to appear afraid of idolaters, he added these words in Aramaic, \u201cThus shall you say to them\u2026\u201d, so that if among the people there were some of these idolaters they would hear him addressing all the people [and not only their Babylonian captors].<\/span><\/p>\n

Shadal also cited and rejected the opinion of a Christian scholar named Hubigant who suggested that the Aramaic was originally part of a Targum that was inadvertently reinserted into the biblical text by a careless copyist, calling that supposition \u201ca dream.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

*For an explanation of our objectives in studying Shadal\u2019s commentary, <\/span>see our introduction<\/span><\/a> in Jeremiah chapter 1.<\/span><\/p>\n

Image: Aramaic – selection from the Syriac Peshitta.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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