Arama'a

Arama'a (from the Hebrew word Aram, signifying the 'highland,' in opposition to the lowland of Canaan) includes the whole of the country situated to the NE. of Palestine. It embraced the countries known to the Greeks by the various names of Syria, Babylonia, and Mesopotamia. The Aramaic language, a branch of the Semitic, was common to the whole country, and was divided into two principal dialects—the West Aramaic or Syriac, and the East Aramaic, or, as it is improperly termed, the Chaldee. The former was that spoken almost universally in Palestine in the time of Christ. After the Babylonian captivity, the pure Hebrew, in which the whole of the Old Testament, with the exception of a few chapters in Daniel and Ezra, had been written, gradually gave place to the Aramaic. It was the common tongue of Palestine in the time of Jesus, and his quotations from the Old Testament are from an Aramaic version rather than from the original Hebrew; as, for instance, the beginning of the 22d Psalm, which he repeated on the Cross; while all the Semitic words that occur in the New Testament, as well as in Josephus, are also Aramaic, as Mammon, Raka, Eli, Eli, &c.; Talitha kumi, Abba, &c. The Talmud, especially the Babylonian, has a large admixture of Aramaic elements, while the Targums are entirely composed in this idiom. The Aramaic dialect is, in general, the harshest, poorest, and least elaborate of all the Semitic languages, and has now almost entirely died out and given place to the Arabic and Persian. In respect of development it stands midway between classical Hebrew and modern Arabic, having lost the severe simplicity of the one without gaining the flexible variety of the other. See SEMITES, BIBLE (Vol. II. p. 126), and TARGUM.