Hebrew: Language Of The Old Testament
Hebrew belongs to the Semitic language group, a family of ancient tongues in the Fertile Crescent that included Akkadian, the dialect of Nimrod in Genesis 10 Ugaritic, the language of the Canaanites and Aramaic, commonly used in the Persian empire.
Hebrew was written from right to left and consisted of 22 consonants. In its earliest form, all the letters ran together. Later, dots and pronunciation marks were added to make it easier to read. As the language progressed, vowels were included to clarify words that had become obscure.
Sentence construction in Hebrew might place the verb first, followed by the noun or pronoun and objects. Because this word order is so different, a Hebrew sentence cannot be translated word-for-word into English. Another complication is that a Hebrew word might substitute for a commonly used phrase, which had to be known to the reader.
Different Hebrew dialects introduced foreign words into the text. For example, Genesis contains some Egyptian expressions while Joshua, Judges, and Ruth include Canaanite terms. Some of the prophetic books use Babylonian words, influenced by the Exile.
Why Was The New Testament Written In Greek
The New Testament of the Bible was written in Greek because Greek was the linga franca, or common language, of the Roman Empire. As a result, the authors of wrote in Greek even when it wasn’t the language they spoke, ensuring that their manuscripts could be widely read and passed on to future generations. Greek probably became the Roman lingua franca as a result of the empire of Alexander the Great, a Greek military leader who conquered a large section of the Ancient World, introducing people to the language.
The form of Greek used to write the New Testament is known as Koine or Common Greek, and it represents an evolutionary step between Ancient Greek and its Modern Version, meaning that people must learn Koine Greek specifically if they want to read the document in its original language. In many parts of the Roman Empire, Koine Greek was actually the official language, rather than Latin, because its use was so widespread. Some scholars refer to Koine Greek as Biblical Greek, in a reference to its arguably most famous application.
The Importance Of The Septuagint
After the translation of the Torah, the other books of the Old Testament were translated. The New Testament was originally written in Greek.
This Greek translation of the Bible is important because it added theological concepts that help to better understand the religious and political context in which the prophets lived. The Septuagint has helped scholars determine which manuscripts are most reliable, giving a faithful translation of the Old Testament.
In addition, the Septuagint helps to better understand Jewish theology, by better understanding the worship practices of the Jewish people.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are names entered into the Bible through the Septuagint. Just as the division of the books into law, history, poetry, and prophets, as well as the subdivision of books like 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, etc., are due to the Septuagint.
The Septuagint was the Bible of the early church, and the most cited text by the Apostles and authors of the New Testament. Mark 7: 6-7 says: Jesus replied, Isaiah was right about you hypocrites when he said, These people claim they honor me, but in their thinking they are far from me. Theres no point in their worship of me, for what they teach as doctrines are merely human rules, referring to the Septuagint.
Today, the Bible has been fully translated into 450 languages.
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When Was The New Testament Compiled
To compile intimates an intentional time and place in which various documents or fragments are united into one. The New Testament nor the Old came about this way. Rather, the books of the New Testament were received by the Church as Gods Word by numerous quantitative and qualitative factors.1 Chapter one of the Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes those factors in its article 5 :
We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole , the full discovery it makes of the only way of mans salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
What Was The Original Language Of The Hebrew Bible Not As Simple As It Sounds
In brief, the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was originally written in Hebrew, except for half of Daniel , a portion of Ezra , and a word or verse here and there in Aramaic. This was because Hebrew was the language of the Israelites until the Babylonian captivity , at which time they were heavily influenced by Aramaic. This related Semitic language had intersected with Hebrew before, but it rose to prominence under the Neo-Assyrian Empire where it achieved the status of a prestige language.
The earliest recorded instance of biblical interplay between Aramaic and Hebrew occurs in Genesis 31:47 where Jacob and Laban erected a pillar of stones to mark the covenant between them. Each named the heap-of-stones monument. Jacob named the pillar in Hebrew, while Laban did so in Aramaic. Galeed was Jacobs appointed Hebrew title, whereas Labans label in Aramaic was Jegar-sahadutha . The relationship must have been very close, because later, Moses taught the Israelites that their ancestor Jacob was a wandering Aramean .
In any case, Aramaic was inherited from the Assyrians by the Babylonians where it continued to be utilized for administrative, legal, and commercial purposes. During the period of the Babylonian captivity, an entire generation or two of Jewish exiles was born in a land that spoke a foreign language, as Moses had warned. The result was that Aramaic became the dominant language of the displaced Judeans, and for many, it had become their new mother tongue.
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Cyrus And The Persian Era
In 538 BC, Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and established the Achaemenid Empire , which at the time was the largest empire the world had ever seen. However, this had no effect on the language of the Hebrews. Cyrus quickly issued the Edict of Restoration , which allowed the repatriation of various peoples conquered by the Babylonians to return home .
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Where Is The Original Bible
First editions of famous books are carefully kept by collectors or displayed in museums. So, where is the first edition of the Bible? Where is the original handwritten version of the various Bible books kept? Unfortunately, we dont have any originals. The Bible books were written on materials like papyrus, leather and parchment. These materials do not last very long. Therefore, the Bible books were copied by hand to preserve and multiply them. This was a lot of work, and every now and then copyists made a mistake which would then be corrected or taken over by the next copyist. That way, some small differences developed. Sometimes we cant be sure which version is original and which one has been changed over the centuries. The vast majority of these variations are just linguistic, they dont influence the meaning of the text.
Although the original Bible books have been lost, we do have almost 6000 very old manuscripts of the New Testament alone, dating from the 2nd to the 16th century.
Some cover entire Bible books, others just snippets. Carefully studying these manuscripts has helped scholars to establish the original wording of all Bible texts with great certainty. For more detailed information on the question whether our modern Bibles resemble the original Bible text, read our article about this topic. With this background information in mind, lets move on to the main question of this article.
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What Were The Original Languages Of The Bible
Note: a few chapters of the books Ezra and Daniel , one verse in Jeremiah are written, not in ancient Hebrew, but in Aramaic. Aramaic is about as closely related to Hebrew as Spanish is to Portuguese. However, the differences between Aramaic and Hebrew are not those of dialect, and the two are regarded as two separate languages.
Literature And The Arts
The Bible has directly and indirectly influenced literature: St Augustine‘s Confessions is widely considered the first autobiography in Western Literature. The Summa Theologica, written 12651274, is “one of the classics of the history of philosophy and one of the most influential works of Western literature.” These both influenced the writings of Dante‘s epic poetry and his Divine Comedy, and in turn, Dante’s creation and sacramental theology has contributed to influencing writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and William Shakespeare.
Many masterpieces of Western art were inspired by biblical themes: from Michelangelo’s David and Pietà sculptures, to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and Raphael’s various Madonna paintings. There are hundreds of examples. Eve, the temptress who disobeys God’s commandment, is probably the most widely portrayed figure in art.The Renaissance preferred the sensuous female nude, while the “femme fatale” Delilah from the nineteenth century onward demonstrates how the Bible and art both shape and reflect views of women.
The Bible has many rituals of purification which speak of clean and unclean in both literal and metaphorical terms. The biblical toilet etiquette encourages washing after all instances of defecation, hence the invention of the bidet.
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Alexander The Great Brought Greek To Mesopotamia
Alexander the Great.
CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images
In addition to Aramaic and Hebrew, Greek and Latin were also common in Jesus time. After Alexander the Greats conquest of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Persian Empire in the fourth century B.C., Greek supplanted other tongues as the official language in much of the region. In the first century A.D., Judea was part of the eastern Roman Empire, which embraced Greek as its lingua franca and reserved Latin for legal and military matters.
As Jonathan Katz, a Classics lecturer at Oxford University, told BBC News, Jesus probably didnt know more than a few words in Latin. He probably knew more Greek, but it was not a common language among the people he spoke to regularly, and he was likely not too proficient. He definitely did not speak Arabic, another Semitic language that did not arrive in Palestine until after the first century A.D.
So while Jesus most common spoken language was Aramaic, he was familiar withif not fluent, or even proficient inthree or four different tongues. As with many multilingual people, which one he spoke probably depended on the context of his words, as well as the audience he was speaking to at the time.
What Significance Does The New Testament Have For Christians
In the New Testament Gods revelation is completed. The four Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the centerpiece of Sacred Scripture and the most precious treasure of the Church. In them the Son of God shows himself as he is and encounters us. In the Acts of the Apostles we learn about the beginnings of the Church and the working of the Holy Spirit. In the letters written by the apostles, all facets of human life are set in the light of Christ. In the Book of Revelation we foresee the end of the ages.
Jesus is everything that God would like to tell us. The entire Old Testament prepares for the Incarnation of Gods Son. All of Gods promises find their fulfillment in Jesus. To be a Christian means to unite oneself ever more deeply with the life of Christ. To do that, one must read and live the Gospels. Madeleine Delbrêl says, Through his Word God tells us what he is and what he wants he says it definitively and says it for each individual day. When we hold our Gospel book in our hands, we should reflect that in it dwells the Word that wants to become flesh in us, desires to take hold of us, so that we might begin his life anew in a new place, at a new time, in a new human setting.
The words of God, expressed in human language, are in every way like human speech, just as the word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the weak flesh of human beings, became like them.
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Could The Israelites Read What Moses Wrote At Mt Sinai
A key question that surfaced in the film, Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy was related to whether or not Moses could have written the Torah. Arguments were related to whether or not an alphabet even existed at the time of Moses, and whether or not there was a reading public for which he could have or would have produced such a document.
The simple answer was that Yes, an alphabet existed that had already been developed from Egyptian hieroglyphics, by a Semitic person. This individual was someone who was able to read ancient Egyptian and was simultaneously motivated to adapt its characters for use in an alphabet for his Semitic readership. This resolved one key objection to the Mosaic authorship of the Torah.
Patterns of Evidence: The Moses Controversy
But what about the question of audience? Why would Moses write a Torah if there was no reading public? We have previously explored how this scenario gave rise to the development of delegated authority and to the role that the Torah played in the establishment of legal precedent. But there is more to the story.
Shifting Scripts: From Pictos To Squares
One of the impacts of this period is that the form of Hebrew was permanently altered. After the return from exile, Ezra the Scribe shifted the written style of Hebrew from the earlier Paleo-Hebrew script to the refined Aramaic square script, though the earlier form remained in use through the 1st century on a limited basis. One wonders if he made this switch simply because he had been accustomed to it, or perhaps he recognized it as an improvement. Maybe it was an accommodation to literate Jewish readers who needed one less obstacle with which to have to deal. In any case, the shift happened, and the square script instituted by Ezra is still in use today, referred to as the Jewish script.
A more serious consequence of the Judean immersion in Babylonian culture was that by the close of the 1st century BC, Hebrew was essentially relegated to an academic and liturgical language. This means that well before the time of Christ, the language barrier had proven so strong, that the shift was non-reversible and the gap between the Aramaic speaking Jews and their Hebrew Bible had only continued to widen.
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What About The Versions
How does God regard those who make deliberate changes to the revelationHe has given?Rev.22:18, 19.
Although specifically referring to adding to and taking away from the bookof Revelation, the principle applies to making deliberate changes in anybook of the Bible. As the need arose for versions in different languagesand within languages because of their constantly changing nature, the restrictionfound in the book of Revelation serves, among other things, as a guide tokeep translators from taking liberties with Gods Word.
In spite of Gods warnings, some liberties have been taken. Ellen White states:I saw that God had especially guarded the Bible yet when copies of it werefew, learned men had in some instances changed the words, thinking that theywere making it more plain, when in reality they were mystifying that whichwas plain by causing it to lean to their established views, which were governedby tradition. But I saw that the Word of God, as a whole, is a perfect chain,one portion linking into and explaining another.Early Writings,pp. 220, 221. Even though there may be some errors owing to human-made changesin any one version, our interpretation is to rest on the weight of evidenceas we take into consideration all that the Bible has to say on a topic.
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Should I Read The Bible In Its Original Languages
Nowadays, many people around the world profit from Bible translations in languages they can understand clearly. Thats a wonderful way to get access to Gods Word! It is still valuable to learn Hebrew and Greek if you want to delve deeper and study the Bible in its original languages, but a good translation is just as much Gods Word as the original Hebrew scrolls or Greek manuscripts are. You do not need to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to know God or in order to be saved.
The fact that Jesus quoted the Septuagint and that the New Testament Bible books were written in Greek instead of Hebrew, makes clear that God does not favor one human language over another. He does not require people to learn a new or holy language in order to read the Bible, but had His Word written down in languages that were best known to the original audiences. Actually, this is not very surprising when we realize that God took the enormous step to express His eternal, universal truths in human language in the first place. Compared to this, translating the Bible from one human language into another is only a minor step!
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