How Similar Are Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic?

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Published 2023-08-31
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In this episode I examine Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic - the languages of the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament") - and see how similar they are!

In this video I did my best to pronounce Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic with their original full range of phonemes, including sound distinctions that you won't hear in Modern Hebrew. If you know some Modern Hebrew (or a modern form of Aramaic) the pronunciation in this video will sound different. I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly, but I tried to make it as authentic as possible.

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Creative Commons images used in this video:

docs.google.com/document/d/1laUhSmw2k_hfQ29xpr_AaD…

Commercial images licensed from Shutterstock.com

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction
00:19 Brief history
01:14 General similarities between Biblical Hebrew & Aramaic
03:05 Similar cognate vocabulary
03:51 MyHeritage (the sponsor of this episode)
06:42 Sound correspondences between Hebrew and Aramaic cognates
09:13 Differences in grammar
15:31 Comparing an Aramaic Bible verse with Hebrew translation
20:34 Comparing an Aramaic Targum verse with the Hebrew original

All Comments (21)
  • @Langfocus
    A big thanks to MyHeritage for sponsoring this episode! Use the following link to get a DNA kit and use the coupon code "Langfocus" for free shipping: bit.ly/Langfocus
  • @antonklroberts
    Shlama, as a native Aramaic speaker and someone who can speak Hebrew to an extent I’m really excited for this😍😍
  • @bramilan
    Can we all appreciate the fact that Paul did the whole reading by himself without anyone reading in Hebrew or Aramaic like he usually does? Impressive!
  • @sargejacob
    Im an Assyrian and I approve this message !!! Shlama to all my Assyrians and Jews 🙏🏼 we still speak Aramaic, and it is our first language 💙🤍❤️ khaya Ashur 💪🏻💪🏻
  • @erdood3235
    I'm a Jew born and lived my whole life in Israel, and for most of my childhood, i thought the Aramaic words were just "high language" Hebrew, like thees and thous. Not that they were foreign.
  • @eelmohamed
    As an Arabic speaker, I find most of the words you mentioned are very similar to Arabic and have the same meaning.😊
  • @ak47dragunov
    As a native Hebrew speaker I've always found it fun to read over the Aramaic portions of the prayer book/bible and pick out all the cool parallels to Modern Hebrew. For me, at least it's very easy to understand. Once you have an eye for the roots, everything else falls into place.
  • @cjaoun23240
    I'm Maronite Catholic and we use Syriac Aramaic in liturgy. Its interesting how similar Aramaic and Arabic are.
  • @Marsel-ov6yg3im5c
    We Assyrians (Chaldeans and Syriac people as well) have our form of Aramaic ( Assyrian Neo-Aramaic or basically Syriac) that we still speak within our daily live and in our churches. We call it Assyrian as a slang but it’s a modern Aramaic version that we native Christian Mesopotamians speak as our first language. We have two dialects eastern and western.
  • @jacob_and_william
    Another thing I would mention is that for millenia, learned Jewish men were and continue to be bilingual in both Hebrew and Aramaic. As a result, Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic have influenced each other greatly. In Modern Hebrew there are features of Aramaic ranging from extremely casual speech to legal texts and poetry, and many of the features which make Modern Hebrew different from Biblical Hebrew are from Aramaic influence (albeit later dialects than Imperial Aramaic)
  • @AntonAdelson
    Man, as a religious jew who likes Arameic prayers we use I am sooo thankful for this! We were never taught Aramaic. We just read it and memorise by heart. Thank you!
  • @YousufAhmad0
    As a non Arab who can read and partially speak some Arabic, I can say that Biblical Aramaic is strikingly similar to Classical Arabic to the point of being relatively intelligible even to me. When you romanized the script and read it out, I was able to understand it quite easily based on my Arabic.
  • @eyadbereh
    As a native Arabic speaker, I find this amazing Most of the rules you mentioned apply to Arabic: the prepositions, the negation, the pronouns, the 3-consonant template ... they're almost the same And about 90% of the words you mentioned in this video are used in Arabic as well, so this is really cool However, I've noticed that Formal Arabic is closer to Biblical Hebrew in pronunciation rules, while our Arabic dialect in Syria is closer to Biblical Aramaic For example the word for gold in the Syrian dialect is also "dahab", while in Formal Arabic it's "zahab"
  • @BSBYLYHWH
    Your pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew was outstanding. Keep up the good work! Many people will say “This pronunciation is strange and not Hebrew”, but they are thinking of Modern Hebrew, rather than acknowledging Ancient Hebrew and its ‘original’ sounds. Thank you for the video!
  • @kamrat_ett1722
    As a Yiddish speaker it is really weird to see words like מתנה or ארץ in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic, because I understand them but the pronunciation is so different!
  • @Tsuta
    Nice one Paul! This was the first time I've seen you pronounce Hebrew with all the sounds that didn't make it to modern Hebrew, and I think you did a great job! כמו תמיד, סרטון מעולה - מעריץ שלך מישראל
  • @Ruthlessleader
    As a native speaker of Arabic, hearing both languages was like hearing minecraft villagers communicating in wierd, somewhat harsh arabic with a liiiittle bit of wierd vocabulary.
  • @ShikaStyle123
    As a Hebrew speaker I couldn't understand modern Aramaic at all. Ancient Aramaic I would only understand when written and analyzed thoroughly. I've met a few modern Aramaic speakers, they were able to understand me better than I did them, mostly because of the pronunciation. Modern Hebrew has a very clear pronunciation, most of the non-common sounds dropped.
  • @SolomonsCave
    Always glad to see other content creators discuss Biblical Hebrew 😁