Surely if the Holy Spirit is the only thing necessary then not only would they not need to learn biblical languages but also when reading a translation it would just come to them the exact word or words in the original languages to the translated text they are reading right ?

Any recommendations for a good resource to learn Biblical Aramaic (Daniel/Ezra) for someone already comfortable with Biblical Hebrew?

Free resources are great, but book suggestions would also be helpful.

(Apologies if this is a repeat question: I search and couldn't find any earlier posts)

I came across this book while looking through the language study section of Christian Books. Is it a good scholarly work? I’m trying to learn Hebrew and then Aramaic and I’m trying to keep the less than good and useful material to a minimum.

I know that Aramaic and Hebrew are two different languages, but for whatever reason when I try to find resources about Biblical Aramaic (not modern-Aramaic/Syriac) the resource also includes Biblical Hebrew. Is this because these two languages are so closely related that it is necessary to learn both?

Second, are the terms Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, and Galilean Aramaic the same thing? When I search for resources, these terms seem to be used interchangeably.

Thanks in advance!

TL;DR: What is the specific type of Aramaic Jesus spoke, and is it possible to learn it?

Good morning to everyone, I hope you're all well.

Just as a note/warning: the questions I'm asking are from a beginner who knows very little about the subject matter other than some information, primarily on linguistics. I don't know if I'll actually ever succeed in completing all the studies for which the resources I'm asking for would be used, but I think a recommendation wouldn't hurt anything and would be useful for finding a starting point I and some friends could use to begin readings into this field. I thank you all for your patience and your help, it's sincerely appreciated. :)

I was hoping that the members of this subreddit could refer me to introductory works on Biblical studies, both old and new testament. Some friends and I want to start seriously reading into the topic and wanted a starting point. We've already began reading the bible and were hoping for additional academic resources on the subject. Among books discussing a general/introductory overview. I was hoping you guys could also recommend works dealing with manuscripts and languages of the Bible.

I was also hoping for recommendations on learning classical/ancient Hebrew, how to go about it and what resources to use. So far we've thought of using Strong's Concordance (though this seems to just be centered around the KJV Bible rather than a general lexicon -- is it useful?). I was also look at the The New Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew & English Dictionary to help us. The issue is that these are all just lexicons, we were hoping textbooks on grammar could be recommended as well. The same for the Aramaic and Syriac languages (dictionaries and textbooks). I have already heard of Nöldeke's work on Syriac grammar, is it good? All of us have a background in Semitic languages in learning the grammar of Classical/Ancient Arabic (fuṣḥâ), I don't know if that would help us. And finally, we don't know if we'll ever attempt to learn Greek or Latin, but having a reference list of resources to learn them would be useful nonetheless if anyone ever attempts it, we were hoping we could be recommended textbooks and dictionaries for learning Latin, Koine and Archaic/Homeric Greek.

Thank you all. :)

I'm not going to provide a source or anything for my assertion that "pronea" ONLY means "Sex where you don't wear a condom and have an STD" in the Bible. That's just clearly what it says!

And here you are quoting me some scholars, or some lexicon, saying that's not true. Sigh Don't you know that college is just the sign that you have money. It's not that important, college. And I say that as someone who has a whole 3.3 GPA!

So go look up the words and THINK like a good Christian like me. I'll just sit here oblivious to the fact that wherever you look up the word's definition, it's probably just the scholarly consensus in some book edited by so-called scholars.

Aramaic Lexicon (Biblical Language) Online Translator, when the site comes up, type "God" and see what comes up. Crazy!

Pretty interesting to say the least.

LINK: http://www.peshitta.org/lexicon/

This article explores the symbolic meaning behind the letters in the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabet and how they reveal hidden meanings within the words of the Bible. When each letter's symbolic meaning is deconstructed within a word, it seems to have a profound meaning that coincides with its definition. A meaning is also revealed for key words in the famous "homosexual" passages which seems to confirm a connection with shrine prostitution, violence in Sodom and child sex slavery. http://moanti.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/aramaic-and-hebrew-letters-reveal-hidden-meaning-in-the-bible-including-the-words-for-god-jesus-peace-sin-homosexuality-etc/

With Christmas break, I finally have time to let my mind wander freely and somehow I ended up at this question which I'm not sure counts as biblical history, historical linguistics, or what. If my premise doesn't make sense, my apologies.

Basically I was thinking about the general "rule" in languages that languages that are left alone get more complex, and languages that are adopted by lots of new speakers get simpler. A recent historical example is Xhosa and Zulu, which are essentially sister languages, but Zulu is more regularized in terms of grammar, basically because Zulu was a language of empire and conquest. A more familiar example is English - Old English looked a lot more like German and Dutch, with a lot more cases, genders and irregularities, but those got worn away as Scandinavians immigrated to England and adopted English, and essentially "creolized" it.

Hebrew seems to be a lot more regularized of a language than the sort of "left-to-themselves" languages. Granted I am much more familiar with Modern Hebrew than Biblical, but the things that stick out to me are:

• few cases
• few irregular plurals (cf. Arabic, I mean, come on)
• few irregular verbs
• straightforward grammar (not a lot of "exceptions" to memorize)

My question is, has anyone looked at this and done any comparative linguistics to determine how consolidated the Israelites were at the time the Bible was written? Has anyone looked at, say, Phoenician, or a less-traveled language, to see if Biblical Hebrew was more or less regular than you would expect? Or looked at documents from different parts of ancient Palestine to see how popular the dialect of the Bible was, or when in time it might have become more regularized?

The basic underlying question is: does Biblical Hebrew look like the language of a culturally consolidated people, or does it look more like one point on a long spectrum? Can we say whether the Israelites were already a cohesive ethnolinguistic identity by the time the first layers of the Bible were written? If so, was that because of a pre-Biblical political experience? Or is my premise totally wrong and Biblical Hebrew is more complex than I assume it to be?

So in May 2018, I wrote a big post that was in effect a short guide to (what I thought to be) the most essential commentary or commentaries for every book in the Hebrew Bible. If you want the full breakdown on how exactly I assessed* "essential," you can read more in the original post; but it pretty much all boiled down to which commentaries were most philologically and analytically comprehensive, and the most recent.

The business of high–level commentary writing is for the most part pretty slow, for obvious reasons. However, in 2022 there are now a ton of different commentary series out there; and so really, there are multiple commentaries coming out every month. Of course, though, there's pretty wide variance in terms of the quality and intended audience of these.

So this is just a short update to what's new in the world of top-tier commentaries since early 2018. Note, though, that in later 2018, I already made some edits to my original post: to the entry for Isaiah, and some to Zechariah; and I also added new commentaries and details to the section on Amos, Ezekiel, Nahum and Habakkuk.

Finally, please let me know if you know of a post-2017 commentary that I've missed out on. I'd love to be able to add it to this list.

The Anchor series has been quiet since 2018. At the time of my original post, Williamson's massive commentary on Isaiah 6-12 had just been released; and I had mentioned the forthcoming publication of Stephen Cook's commentary on Ezekiel 38-48, released in November 2018.

In what's to me is a rather strange choice, the next slated Anchor release is David Brakke's commentary on the Gospel of Judas, coming out next month. After that, in April, it will release Daniel Schwartz's commentary on 1 Maccabees, replacing the older Anchor commentary by Goldstein from 1976. There's a lot to live up to there, as Goldstein's was definitely one of the best older entries; though Schwartz has already written a fantastic commentary on 2 Maccabees for the Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature series. (On that note, nothing has been released by CEJL since Allison's 2018 commentary on 4 Baruch.)

Hermeneia has been a bit more active than Anchor since 2018. Outside of the canon entirely, VanderKam has continued his es

Hey everyone,

I will be reading the Book of Jubilees & The Book of Enoch alongside Genesis in January. These are seen as holy scriptures to the Oriental Orthodox Tehwado Etheopian/Eritrean Church.

I am using the 2 volume Hermeneia Commentary for each (massive books). I will share the text of the scriptures here on this forum if you would like to read along.

I have a deep interest in Biblical Pseudigrapha and will try to keep parallel Pseudigrapha posts in the forum around the Biblical readings we do through the year.

##Jubilees: A Commentary in Two Volumes

James C. VanderKam (Author)

https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800660352/Jubilees

>Jubilees—so called because of its concern with marking forty-nine-year periods (or "jubilees") in Israel's history—is an ancient rewriting of Genesis and the first part of Exodus from the point of view of an anonymous second-century BCE Jewish author. Its distinctive perspective-as well as its apparent popularity at Qumran-make it particularly important for any reconstruction of early Judaism. James C. VanderKam, the world's foremost authority on Jubilees, offers a new translation based on his own critical editions of all the available textual evidence, including the Hebrew fragments preserved at Qumran (which he first published in Discoveries in the Judean Desert, vol. 13), as well as the first full running commentary on the book in the English language. Jubilees approaches the book as a rewriting of scripture but also as a literary work in its own right. The commentary explains the text and the teachings of the author with comprehensive coverage of the modern scholarship devoted to them. The introduction sets the book in its second-century BCE context, traces its sources in the Bible and in other early Jewish texts, and describes its influence on Jewish and Christian writers.

##1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36; 81-108

George W. E. Nickelsburg (Author), Klaus Baltzer (Editor)

https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800660741/1-Enoch-1

>1 Enoch is one of the most intriguing books in the Pseudepigrapha (Israelite works outside the Hebrew canon). It was originally written in Aramaic and is comprised of several smaller works, incorporating traditions from the three centuries before the Common Era. Employing the name of the ancient patriach Enoch, the Aramaic text was translated into Greek and then into Ethiopic. But as a whole, it is a classic example

First, sorry if this is the wrong place to post, I it would be really hard to find anyone who took the time to learn biblical and modern hebrew in other christian subreddits.

I'm going to attempt to learn hebrew and then biblical hebrew. I figure it may take over a year before I can really read a bible in modern hebrew before I even begin to attempt biblical hebrew. I was wondering if when the original hebrew is translated into modern hebrew it loses a lot of the meaning like it is when it is translated into english where it seems that english translators seem to have a hard time choosing the correct words to use.

Hey guys, I'm studying modern Hebrew by myself and I intend on learning Aramaic (and Yiddish) in the future. My question is: do Israelis pronounce Aramaic (biblical or not) as they do Modern Hebrew ? or do they change their accents/pronunciation to differentiate it from Hebrew ?

• ex.: אַ אָ are both pronounced the same /a/
• ex.: אְ אֵ are both pronounced the same /e/
• ditto: ח and כ
• ditto: ק and כּ, etc.

The satire that became biblical canon. Incredible! I'm not kidding, keep reading.

It turns out that if you read aloud the Samson story (Judges 13-16) in Hebrew as a script for a theater comedy - it morphs into an outrageously funny Greek satire that parodies biblical heroes and tropes. Once read aloud this way, the spell is broken, and the biblical text as it is, word for word, slides seamlessly into its original purpose.

The AMAZING thing about it is that you don't need to "prove" it or "convince" someone. It's a comedic play because I already performed it to my friends, and they performed it back to me. This can be performed tomorrow as is in any street in Israel. As is! And it should be performed! It was probably written by Alexandrian Jews around the 200s BCE, when they were doing the Septuagint and writing biblical stories with Greek elements. According to the research that we've done, This was a community that did not take its stories too seriously.

We missed the joke because it was read out of context. Or in a different language but Hebrew. It's as if 3,000 years from now, people will think Monty Python's The Life of Brian was a story we took seriously. Amazing. This peak Ancient Greek comedy has been hiding in plain sight for more than 2000 years!

In a nutshell, Samson is a poor man's Hercules, in line with the genre, both lame and clueless (kills a baby lion, lifts a gate for no reason, is not betrayed by a woman, but confides in her because she nagged him so much he wanted to die). The story also mocks the bible's notorious timing problems! There's a feast, and Samson riddles a riddle and gives the Philistines seven days to solve it. They can't solve it for three days, and then it's day seven (cue laughs. The NIV translated it as "on the fourth day!" Fake news!), his wife is afraid of the Philistines, so she cries over him for the seven days of the feast, even though we were just told it's day 7, and then immediately we're on the day 7 again. Intentionally hilarious, not stupid and unintentionally funny or crappy editing. This is such a meticulously written satire, that according to Poe's Law got people believing it was sincere. For it to be PERFECT as a parody even though it was intended to be a bizarre "regular" biblical tale, is no less than a miracle that would be hard to recreate. Maybe when you read Harry Potter as is in a comedic tone, it turns into a PERFECT spoof of child wizard stories?

There's also the hilariously ridiculous st

Can someone translate "in the beginning there was Night" to Aramaic(biblical Aramaic) since I read here there are more than one type of Aramaic. Thanks in advance.

This is in reply to another post on this subreddit. I decided to make a post to raise the visibility of my response.

If you look up just about any Bible study guide it will show Abraham as being born in Southern Mesopotamia in what is now Southern Iraq. Some will even show pictures of the ancient city of Ur, which is a famous archeological site on the Euphrates River. The problem is that the city of Ur is not what has been considered the traditional homeland of Abraham for literally thousands of years. Traditionally Northern Mesopotamia, in what is now Southern Turkey, was considered the homeland of Abraham. So what happened?

From the Bible we know that Abraham came from a city referred to as Ur of the Chaldees. In 1927 an English archeologist named Leonard Woolley announced that he had uncovered the historical site of the city of Ur. In his archeological digs in Southern Mesopotamia he uncovered an ancient city named Ur which was ruled over by the Chaldeans. It caused quite a stir and ever since then biblical scholars, lay persons, and Bible study guides have cited that location as the homeland of Abraham.

But later excavations showed a problem with this identification. The name of the city was Ur, and Chaldeans did live there, but the Chaldeans didn't move into the area until about 800 years after Abraham lived. So the timeline didn't quite work. This, along with a number of other ideas floating around at the time, lead some Biblical scholars to conclude that the story of Abraham was a later fabrication. Some expressed doubt that Abraham was even a real person. Given the probable date of when the Torah was written the Chaldeans were a group of people that were politically of particular interest to the Jews.

The rulers of Babylon during the 7th and 6th centuries BC were Chaldeans, meaning they were the people responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. So the speculation was that the original author(s) of the Torah erroneously associated Abraham with the Chaldeans having Abraham leaving the land of his birth among the Chaldeans.

But this particular view point all depends on Leonard Woolley correctly identifying Ur in Southern Mesopotamia as the actual homeland of Abraham. There are a couple problems with associating Ur in Southern Mesopotamia with the Ur of the Chaldees mentioned in the Bible.

First, linguistic evidence. Chaldean is a Western Semitic language. Akkadian, which was language spoken in Southern Mesopotamia, is an *Eas

This is not lite reading, but it is light reading, ha ha. The detailed evidences for the restoration go on and on. We don't want to forget, the one on one revelation the Lord promises us if we qualify for it(explained in scripture), but amazing physical evidences are also everywhere throughout the scriptures, and other related sources.

Joseph’s lucky “Guess” From the Book of Moses (About Enoch’s Pal, Mahujah) Not lucky, but revelation!

"If Joseph Smith is simply drawing off of what he could learn from his KJV Bible, Mahijah should not exist in the Book of Moses (because it doesn’t exist in the Bible). And, technically, you’d expect Mahujah only to show up in the form expressed in the Bible: Mehujael.

And yet, the fact remains that both of the names Joseph uses in the Book of Moses are found in authentic biblical texts Joseph would have had no access to. Either Joseph was an unbelievably lucky fraud, or he was a prophet of God."

Bonus bit

Biblical text is not the only place we find the character Mahujah. He also makes an appearance in the pseudepigraphal Book of Giants in the form of Mahway or Mahaway. Again, Mahway may appear quite different from Mahujah, but they are both acceptable forms of the same Hebrew names. Not only does Mahujah show up in Book of Giants, but the role Mahujah plays in both stories (as one who questions Enoch) is also similar. This is a role not described in any biblical or apocryphal work available to Joseph Smith at the time. Book of Giants only strengthens Joseph’s prophetic claims.https://thirdhour.org/blog/faith/script ... h-mahujah/

Enoch’s Encounters with the Gibborim

The Book of Giants is a collection of fragments from an Enochic book discovered at Qumran. Though it is missing from the Ethiopic book of 1 Enoch1  and resembles little else in [Page 30]the Enoch tradition, material related to the Book of Giants is included in Talmudic and medieval Jewish literature, in descriptions of the Manichaean canon,2 in citations by hostile heresiologists, and in third and fourth century fragments from Turfan published by Henning in 1943.3 Later, several fragments of a related work were identified among the Qumran manuscripts.

...out of nowhere, appears Mahijah, the only named character besides Enoch himself in Joseph Smith’s story of Enoch: “And there came a man unto him, whose name was Mahija

The book called "INJIL" in the Quran is an imaginary book that never existed in history. The reason why the Quran mentions such a book is because of a misunderstanding on Muhamad's part.

We know that christianity was not entirely unknown in the Hejaz region which contains the muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Just three casual observations will suffice to prove this:

1. Muhamad's first wife Khadijah's uncle is said to have been a sort of christian who might have been involved in partial translations of the bible into arabic.
2. the Quranic verse which recounts a reaction from Muhamad's townsfolk which amounted to their sneering at the mention of Jesus and claiming their gods are better than him, indicating they were somewhat familiar with christianity
3. the story that the kaba had 360 idols including statues or icons of Jesus and Mary

Since christianity had already made incursions into arabic culture, christian terms were already in place by the time Muhamad was born. The most central of these terms is of course EUANGELION ("evangel", gospel). Probably the word's journey of reaching arabic from greek was mediated by the syriac language, which was the language of a buffer zone between greek speakers and arabic speakers geographically. Due to this journey, the word 'euangelion' might have lost the -ion suffix in syriac already by the time it entered arabic as "injeel".

So by the time Muhamad was born, there was already arabic speaking christians, or arabic references to christians and their beliefs in the culture, which used phrases such as "the gospel of jesus" i.e. "the injeel of eesa".

Muhammad thought the book "injeel" is a book given to prophet Jesus like the torah was given the prophet Moses, because he must have thought when christians say "the gospel of jesus" it is rather like "the torah of moses".

The fact that christians have a book, which is of course made up of several books, and that they do in fact call some books in the bible 'gospels' individually, must have been what confused Muhammad, who of course couldn't read and probably had no access to these books anyway, or to any christian or jew who was friendly enough to help him out, who also happened to be a knowledgeble person instead just any other wide-eyed ignorant peasant who has nothing but fantastic biblical and extra-biblical tales to tell.

As a result, muslims are the only people on the planet who speak of the existence of a book delivered by Jesus which contained ara

> Saul of Tarsus, better known as Saint Paul, has sometimes been a controversial figure in Christianity. The Gospels by themselves would feature as important wisdom literature, but Paul’s Epistles demonstrate the building of the real theology of Christianity. Although some dislike the apparent cultural inflections in the Epistles, without the theology of Saul of Tarsus there is no Christian Doctrine.

> The Pauline Conspiracy concerns the accusation that Saul of Tarsus did not simply usurp the embryonic Jersusalem Church under Jesus’s brother James, but that he also corrupted the entire original message of Christianity:

https://www.interfaith.org/articles/pauline-conspiracy/

I encountered this particular rabbit hole while going to a Christian private school run by a Bible translation company. Most of my teachers were Biblical scholars that could speak and write Hebrew and Aramaic and a bunch of other languages. These werent your run of the mill evangelicals who speak in gibberish on Wednesday and Sunday after they memorize verses they find when they Google "Top Ten Bible Verses" or watch Benny Hinn on TV.

My English and creative writing teacher was one of these weirdly wonky Bible scholars. He was particularly interested in apocryphal books, and especially those dealing with the War in Heaven and prophecy. I'd have fascinating talks with him about Angelic lore and early Christianity based on his knowledge of these texts that weren't included in the canonized Bible. He even got me a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which I thought were boring as hell and couldnt put in context why they were considered "dangerous" until much later in life).

One day he starts to tell me there is a huge debate amongst scholars over Paul and the entire focus and emphasis on his writings in Modern Christianity. He starts to paint this picture of how Paul was never an original disciple, never met Christ, fell from power as a Roman after essentially being a genocidal maniac and ended up becoming the world's first celebrity by providing legitimacy to the early Christian Church. His later life spent traveling the known world with an assortment of young boys. He starts telling me about the inconsistencies between Paul's words and the direct teachings of Christ. He tells me how it took 1500 years for the canonized version of the Bible to me made available to the public, and during those intervening a Christian church that was fantastically corrupt and had been waging w

##Introduction to The Book of Enoch/ 1 Enoch (Holy Scriptures in The Oriental Orthodox Tehwado Church)

>The Jewish apocalyptic, or revelatory, traditions col lected in 1 Enoch were composed between the fourth century B.C.E. and the turn of the Common Era in the name of the language of patriarch mentioned in Gen 5:21-24. The of their composition was Aramaic, but the col of an inter lection as a whole has been preserved only in a fifth-to sixth-century C.. Ethiopic (Geez) translation of mediate Greek translation (see $2). The place of their composition appears to to have been Palestine, although some of the traditions have roots in Babylon.

>The sheer size, as well as the contents, historical con texts, and ongoing influence of this collection make it arguably the most important text in the corpus of Jewish literature from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Roughly as large as the Book of Isaiah, it comprises an extraordinarily broad range of material that we might define in modern categories as religious, scientific, intel lectual, and social. In it we are given a unique window into the diverse world of Palestinian Judaism in the three centuries before the Common Era. Through it we can view Israelite religion in transition: the Mosaic Torah is not yet a universal norm; the familiar forms of biblical prophecy and proverbial wisdom blend with speculation about the shape and future of the c and Hellenistic ideas and myths give nuances to Israelite traditions. Platitudes about God's justice clash with the realitics of a world that appears to attest the absence or impotence of the God of Israel. The answers and formu lations that arise in this context and are attested in this writing will have a profound impact on the shape of emergent Christianity, as it is documented in the NT. At the same time, the road taken by the Enochic authors and their Christian successors will become increasingly alien to many of the rabbinic teachers and their commu nities as they consolidate their religion after the destruc tion of Jerusalem in 70 c.r. Ironically, however, the seeds sown in Enochic speculative wisdom will blossom in later Jewish mysticism. It is a rich collection from which thoughtful students of Jewish and Christian religion can learn much about how things were and how they came to be what they are.

>In a "postmodern" twenty-first century, the Enochic world seems strange, fantastic, and even weird: fallen angels mating with mortal women, the ghosts of d

Rbl The reason for this ban is the recent decision by InterVarsity to uphold the biblical view of marriage and to ask their employees to do the same . Dr. John Kutsko, executive director of the Society of Biblical Literature, has just proposed that InterVarsity Press–one of the largest evangelical presses in the country– be suspended from having a book stall at the annual SBL meeting . This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record. Cho points out that great works of literature are meant to be read again and again. He says that Bible studies can sometimes get bogged down in minutia and lose the context of the whole.

>New issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature-Volume 140, Number 1, 2021
— Yale Classics Lib (@YaleClassicsLib)

The “Student Supplement” is downloadable, and also contain recommendations for transliteration standards. A major in Biblical Literature stands alone as a strong degree for students with well-formed plans for teaching or ministry, but it is also structured so students can pursue a secondary major in a number of different areas. This allows students to go into a variety of different fields after graduation and bring thoughtful expertise in multiple areas into their careers. Common double-majors include pairing with Christian Ministries, Youth Ministry, or Philosophy. Some students have also added majors or minors in History, International Studies, English, Psychology, or Professional Writing. The impact score , also denoted as Journal impact score , of an academic journal is a measure of the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal.

11 27 Watson And Parkhouse, Telling The Christian Story Differently

There is religious poetry ; love poetry ; wisdom or reflective compositions ; historical works (Ruth, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles ); and apocalypse . I don’t agree with all of Michener’s assumptions and theological conclusions. However, the book is great reading in terms of helping one sense the drama of biblical events.

The Book of All Books — Roberto Calasso’s paean to biblical myth — Financial Times

The Book of All Books — Roberto Calasso’s paean to biblical myth.

Posted: Wed, 15 Dec 2021 08:00:00 GMT

To set the text “There was darkness over all the earth,” I gave the altos and tenors moaning, sinewy melodies that snake around each other unpredictably. T

1st Chronicles
 
Chapter Twenty-nine
 

-1. And said, David, the king, to all the assembly,

“SheLoMoH [“His Peace”, Solomon], my son, one whom chose in him Gods, is young and rough [רך, RaKh],

and the activity is great,

for not to ’ahDahM [“man”, Adam] is the citadel [הבירה, HahBeeYRaH],

but [כי, KeeY] to YHVH Gods.
 

>“The word bȋrāh, rendered palace, is known only in postexilic Hebrew; In Neh. [Nehemiah] 2:10 it occurs in reference to a building overlooking the temple which later became the fortress-tower of Antonia.” (Elmslie, 1954, p. III 438)
 

>“בירה [BeeYRaH] f [feminine] castle, fort, royal residence ǁ *[Rabbinic Hebrew] sanctuary, Temple ǁ o [modern Hebrew] capital city” (Reuben Avinoam (Grossmann), 1960, p. 38) My translation assumes that the reviser conflated the several aspects of the new Jerusalem.
 

-2. “And as [with] all my energy I prepared to [the] house [of] my Gods, the gold to gold, and the silver to silver, and the bronze to bronze, the iron to iron, and the trees to trees,

stones of onyx [שהם, ShoHahM], and set-stones [ומלואים, OoMeeLOo’eeYM], stones of antimony [פוך, POoKh] and inlay [ורקמה, VeReeQMaH],

and every stone precious, and stones of marble to multitude.
 

>“Josephus says, that the temple was built of large blocks of white marble, beautifully polished, so as to produce a most splendid appearance.” (Adam Clarke, 1831, p. II 524)
 

-3. “And more [ועוד, Ve`OD], in my wanting in [the] house [of] my Gods, I have to me treasure of [סגלה, ÇeGooLaH] gold and silver I gave to [the] house [of] my Gods,

above from all I prepared to House the Holy:

-4. Three thousands disks of gold, from gold [of] Ophir,

and seven thousands disk[s] [of] silver pure, to overlay [לטוח, 8 LahTOo-ahH] walls [of] the houses.

-5. To gold to gold, and to silver to silver, and to every activity in [the] hand [of] craftsmen;

and who volunteers to fill his hand to day to YHVH?”
 

>“David invites all to make a freewill offering, and tells them that apart from what he has provided from the national revenue account… he himself heads the subscriptions with his own contribution of approximately $60,000,000.” (Elmslie, 1954, pp. III 438-439)
 

-6. And they volunteered, principles of the fathers, and principles of tribes of YeeSRah-’ayL ["Strove God", Israel], a

I've been working on a conlang I call Namaf ['naməf], based on concepts from Aramaic. One concept that inspired me was that in (at least Biblical) Aramaic, there are attested cases of negation being formed with "NEG particle + existence copula + possessive/objective personal suffix + present participle" (ex.: Daniel 3:18), so "there is no us doing" = "we do not / will not do" (see Greenspahn's "An Introduction to Aramaic", 2nd ed, p. 110-111).

So I decided to tinker with this idea, and made a proto-language where verbs are conjugated on past vs nonpast, with no person or number distinction. It also has noun cases (NOM, ACC, DAT, GEN, LOC, ABL), and SOV word order. The GEN is used for alienable possession -- inalienable is done through simple juxtaposition. A sample sentence "I chopped the tree" (in IPA) in nonpast vs past would be like:

So far so good. But based on the Aramaic idea, I thought "what if in the present/nonpast, they changed a finite verb for a verbal noun, with possessives?" So, it would be like saying "there is my chopping...". I thought it wasn't likely that the ACC would still be used, as we have tons of examples of nouns changing case when they become objects of not-directly-verblike constructions. So I chose the LOC instead, which in the first step of the evolution (with nominalizing suffix -at and 1s possessive suffix -s) would turn out like

"I chop the tree" lit. "There is my chopping at the tree".

This works for 1s, 2s, 1p and 2p directly, but for 3s and 3p, we can just make the language require possessive suffixes on possessed nouns even if it's redundant, which happens often enough:

"The people chop the tree" lit. "There is its chopping the people at the tree".

After enough time, the existence copula can fall off, and negation could just use the negative existence copula. What we've achieved is 1) person & number marking on verbs, but only in the present; 2) change from SOV to VSO, only in the present; 3) present direct objects are marked in the daughter language with a different case than non-present direct objects; 4) didn't go that into it here, but it also creates differe

SECOND CHRONICLES
 
Chapter Two – Agreement between SheLoMoH ["His Peace", Solomon] to HeeYRahM [Hiram]
 

-1. [2. in versions] And counted, SheLoMoH, seventy thousand men [איש, ’eeYSh, (singular)] bearing [סבל, ÇahBahL],

and eighty thousand men quarrying [חצב, HoTsayB] in [the] mountain,

and overseers [ומנצחים, OoMeNahTseHeeYM] upon them three thousands and six hundred.
 

-2. [3.] And sent forth, SheLoMoH, unto HOoRahM [Huram], king [of] TsoR [Tyre], to say,

“As that you did with David, my father, and you sent to him cedars to build to him a house to sit in,

-3. [4.] behold, I am building a house to [the] name YHVH, my Gods,

to sanctify to him, to kindle [להקטיר, LeHahQTeeYR] before him incense [קטרת, QeToRehTh] aromatics [סמים, ÇahMeeYM], and an array continuous,

and offerings to morning and to evening,

to Sabbaths, and to new[-moons], and to seasons of YHVH, our Gods;

to [the] world is this upon YeeSRah-’ayL ["Strove God", Israel].
 

>“The new structure will be a place for sacrificing to the deity, not a ‘dwelling’ for some embodied form.” (North, 1990, p. 372)
 

-4. [5.] And the house that I am building is great,

for greater is our Gods than all the gods.
 

>“… our god is greater than all gods: Written to a pagan from the paragon of wisdom among Israel’s leaders. This is one of the neglected theological pronouncements of the Bible… The name ’ĕlōhȋm is equivalently a plural of El, implying that Israel’s one God is as much the total of whatever is meant by that name among her neighbors. But the existential status of every other El was not so easy to formulate, esp. [especially] in treating diplomatically with the Great Powers who worshiped their own El (not the uncommitted tact of Huram’s reply in v [verse] 12). Basically, the devout Israelite felt that every other El had been degraded to the status of Yahweh’s footstool (Ps [Psalm] 95:7); however, insofar as they were, if anything, supraearthly or heavenly beings, their status was thus imperceptibly merged with that of the angels, as the LXX [Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible] sometimes renders ’ĕlōhȋm (Ps 8:6). The OT [Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible] rarely or never (even in Pss [Psalms] 96:5; 135:6,15; 115:4) comes out and says that idols are not gods at all, that only Yahweh is God. Perhaps even today it is possibl

I got into some silly argument with a Muslim on Quora who made this nonsensical claim, saying that according to the Qur’ān, Allah gave the language to Adam. Anyone with a lick of common sense and understanding of Semitic languages, or even just a passing familiarity with the phonology of Biblical Hebrew, Old Aramaic, Ge‘ez, or even South Arabian, knows that this is utter bullshit, seeing how Arabic lost its equivalent of Biblical Hebrew and Old Aramaic שׂ, Ge‘ez ሠ, and South Arabian 𐩦 (transcribed as ś).

The funniest thing to me about this is that he didn’t realize that not only does the Qur’ān not refute this statement, but in fact this statement (of fact) refutes the Qur’ān.

The only problem is, I have no idea which verses he was referring to, if any…

I know that Aramaic and Hebrew are two different languages, but for whatever reason when I try to find resources about Biblical Aramaic (not modern-Aramaic/Syriac) the resource also includes Biblical Hebrew. Is this because these two languages are so closely related that it is necessary to learn both?

Second, are the terms Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, and Galilean Aramaic the same thing? When I search for resources, these terms seem to be used interchangeably.

Thanks in advance!

?

Hebrew has been revived in Israel. I assume the Hebrew Bible was used as a basis for this. But different parts of the Hebrew Bible were written centuries apart which presumably means the language and grammar will be different between those parts.

So what parts were used as the template for grammar and usage of Modern Hebrew and how were the decisions made?