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Biblical Aramaic is the form of the Aramaic language that is used in the books of Daniel, Ezra and a few other places in the Hebrew Bible. It should not be confused with the Aramaic paraphrases, explanations, and expansions of the Jewish scriptures known as ''targumim''. ==History== As Old Aramaic had served as a ''lingua franca'' in the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the 8th century BCE,〔Franz Rosenthal, ''A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic'' (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1961), p. 5.〕 linguistic contact with even the oldest stages of Biblical Hebrew are easily accounted for. In 2 Kings 18:26, the linguistic situation is directly referred to, as Jerusalem (during the reign of Hezekiah) was besieged by the army of Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The 2 Kings account sets the meeting of the ambassadors of both camps just outside the city walls. Hezekiah's envoys pleaded that the Assyrians make terms in Aramaic so that the people listening would not understand. Thus, Aramaic had become the language of international dialogue, but not of the common people. During the Babylonian exile, Aramaic became the language spoken by the Jews, and the Aramaic square script replaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.〔Moshe Beer, "Judaism (Babylonian)" Anchor Bible Dictionary 3 (1996), p. 1080.〕 After the Persian Empire's capture of Babylon, it became the language of culture and learning. King Darius I declared〔Saul Shaked, "Aramaic" Encyclopedia Iranica 2 (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 251〕 that Aramaic was to be the official language of the western half of his empire in 500 BCE, and it is this Imperial Aramaic language that forms the basis of Biblical Aramaic.〔 Biblical Hebrew was gradually reduced to the status of a liturgical language and a language of theological learning, and the Jews of the Second Temple period would have spoken a western form of Old Aramaic until their partial Hellenization from the 3rd century BCE, and the eventual emergence of Middle Aramaic in the 3rd century CE. Biblical Aramaic's relative chronology has mostly been debated in the context of dating the Book of Daniel. In 1929, Rowley argued that the origin must be later than the 6th century BCE and that the language was more similar to the Targums than the Imperial Aramaic documents available at his time. Others have argued that the language most closely resembles the 5th century Elephantine papyri and is therefore a good representative of typical Imperial Aramaic.〔Choi, Jongtae (1994), "The Aramaic of Daniel: Its Date, Place of Composition and Linguistic Comparison with Extra-Biblical Texts," Ph. D. dissertation (Deerfield, IL: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) (33125990 ) xvii, 288 pp.〕 Kenneth Kitchen takes an agnostic position, stating that the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel is compatible with any period from the 5th to early 2nd century BCE. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Biblical Aramaic」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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