John Mace:
Poor choice of phrasing on my part. Instead, read “that’s why Yiddish came about.” I agree that it wasn’t an intentionally designed language, but my point was that Jews have, throughout their post-Exile history, used Jewish-flavored local languages in non-sacred contexts rather than using Hebrew.
I think there are still some significant differences between the two situations. First, the Latin vernaculars that developed into Italian and the other Romance languages are accurately described as direct “descendants” of Latin.
However, Aramaic and Hebrew are not in the same relationship. They are from two separate sub-branches of the Semitic language family. Aramaic is a part of the Aramaic group and Hebrew is part of the Canaanite group. So, it’s not the case that Aramaic resulted from changes in Hebrew; both languages were descendants of a common ancestor language.
Also, so far as I can tell, the original populations that spoke the two languages were separate groups, the Hebrew speakers being concentrated in Judea and the Aramaic speakers originally coming from further east. It just seems that for whatever reason, the provenance of Hebrew as a vernacular shrank while that of Aramaic grew to encompass most of the Jewish world.
Do a little searching-- there was thread on that exact subject within the last month.
Note that it is fairly likely that Jesus could read Hebrew, and possibly spoke it on special occasions like cmkeller mentioned. He also perhaps was more multi-lingual; during that time, having a working knowledge of Greek and Latin wasn’t uncommon. But yes, for ordinary day to day conversations, most in that area spoke Aramaic.
Since the vast majority of the Palestinian population was illiterate in the 1st Century (an estimated 95-98%), it’s rather unlikely that a Galilean peasant would have been able to read anything.
Dio:
Is there a cite for that? Surely prayer and Torah learning was a regular activity for the common Pharisee Jew back then, and illiteracy doesn’t exactly promote these.
In any case, wouldn’t the founder of Christianity (given the description of his life in the Gospels) have been a Rabbinic Academy student (albeit a somewhat rebellious one) and therefore more literate than the average Palestinian?
Here’s a good site:
http://www.basarchive.org/sample/bswbBrowse.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=29&Issue=4&ArticleID=4
On stone ossuaries the names of the dead were often scratched with something pointed, perhaps a nail, or they were scribbled in charcoal. The way the names are written makes it clear these notices were, for the most part, not the work of professional scribes, but of family members wishing to identify their relatives for posterity.
These ossuary inscriptions, especially the so-called graffiti inscriptions that were scrawled by non-professionals, testify to a higher level of literacy in Jesus’ Israel than is sometimes supposed. Even those people who had difficulty writing plainly and clearly knew how to read and were prepared to make a stab at writing, even on something as important as the ossuary of a family member…
Jesus himself almost certainly knew how to read and write. He read from the scroll of Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue, according to Luke (4:16–17). He also quoted widely from the Jewish holy books. Yet he would rarely have needed to write. In fact, the only instance in the Gospels of Jesus writing occurs in the case of the woman caught in adultery;f when she is brought before him, he writes some mysterious words on the ground with his finger (John 8:1–11)…
Some scholars contend, with Stephen Patterson, that “very few people could read or write [in Jesus’ day].”g But such statements are no longer supported by the evidence. Not everyone could read and write. And some who could read were not necessarily able to write. But archaeological discoveries and other lines of evidence now show that writing and reading were widely practiced in the Palestine of Jesus’ day
Luke 4:16-17
Chapter 4
(13) And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
(14) And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and a report concerning him went out through all the surrounding country.
(15) And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.
» (16) And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read;
(17) and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
(18) “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
(19) to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
(20) And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
John 8:1-11
Chapter 7
(51) They replied, “Are you from Galilee too? Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee.”
(52) They went each to his own house,
(53) but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
Chapter 8
» (1) Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.
(2) The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst
(3) they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery.
(4) Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?”
(5) This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.
(6) And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
(7) And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.
(There’s a bad joke here. After saying “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” , one single rock came out of the crowd. Jesus then said “Mom, sometimes you piss me off”. 
)
From Wiki
*Other scholars, such as Jewish Historian Shmuel Safrai, have argued that the majority of Jewish children in first century Judea received education at schools, a program instituted by Simeon ben Shetah (c. 103-76 BC) and later Joshua ben Gamala (c. 63-65). However, our accounts of this in the Talmud were written down about 200 years after Jesus’ boyhood. The references from Philo and Josephus probably only refer to the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue. Any school system would have to be reinstituted after disruption during the two Jewish revolutions around 70 and 130. Many scholars consider the educational program of Simeon to be a later legend: “What elementary education did exist was carried out within the family, and most often it simply involved instruction in a given craft by the father.” (page 273, see also Craffert-Botha, below). Meier writes:
“Hence, despite inflated claims from some modern authors, we are not to imagine that every Jewish male in Palestine learned to read - and women were rarely given the opportunity. Literacy, while greatly desirable, was not an absolute necessity for the ordinary life of the ordinary Jew. … Taken by themselves, therefore, such influences as reverence for the Torah and respect for literacy do not prove that Jesus was counted among those Jews who could read and study the Scriptures; they simply show what might have been.” (pages 275, 276)
Still, Meier argues that the debates of Jesus over the Scripture in the synagogues and other details suggest that Jesus had the ability to read the sacred Hebrew texts.
“To sum up: individual texts from the Gospels prove very little about the literacy of Jesus. Instead, it is an indirect argument from converging lines of probability that inclines us to think that Jesus was in fact literate. … [S]ometime during his childhood or early adulthood, Jesus was taught how to read and expound the Hebrew Scriptures.” (page 277, 278) *
So, Jesus was likely functionally illiterate, able to stumble through the Torah aided by memory. And read and write perhaps a graffito .
I got the figure from John Crossan’s Historical Jesus. Crossan is one of the foremost scholars in Historical Jesus research (he’s one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar).
Priests and Pharisaic scholars are identified as the ones who could read. There is evidence for other pockets of literacy too, such as the community which produced the Dead sea Scrolls (presumably, the Essenes).
The Gospels don’t say he had any formal Rabbinic training, although the disciples do ocacsionally address him as “Rabbi.” If he did have such training then he would have been able to read, if not, then likely not.
As noted Aramaic wasn’t specific to the Jewish population. It had been established as the administrative language by the Assyrians in the 8th century B.C.E., adopted by the Achaemenids as such by which time it was a common lingua franca of the east and by the time of the Parthians was the common vernacular of Persia ( in the wide sense ). It was only with the Sassanians in the 3rd century C.E. did a version of Persian begin to expand from the province of Fars to become the common language of “greater Persia.”
Coptic isn’t a Semitic language, and it’s not in the same branch as Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. It’s from the Egyptian branch of Afro-Asiatic, and is at least as distant from Semitic languages as any two random branches of Indo-European are from each other.
Hmm, you’re right. I had thought they were all Semitic.
On the other hand, I wonder if (some exceptions aside) it’s really true that they’re no more related than any random Indo-European languages. The Afro-Asiatic languages all share the same basic consonantal-root morphology, as far as I know. It’s common to the entire family, and it’s a complex feature; to my knowledge, it’s still morphologically productive in every branch of the family. There’s not many basic morphological or syntactic features - much less ones this complicated - that you could find shared by every IE language. It makes me suspect that the Afro-Asiatic family might be the result of more recent divergence.
I’d just like to say that I find this fact very impressive. Is the lettering from 2000 years ago that much like contemporary Hebrew lettering?
OTOH, it’s certainly the case that at the time of the earliest recorded Semitic languages (Akkadian?), Egyptian was already quite distinct, and that’s around the time the various IE branches are theorized to have been splitting. And I don’t really see the consonantal root structure as being any more complex than the IE pattern of making semantic and grammatical changes to roots by means of pre- and suffixes and suffixed inflections, which is still productive, to varying degrees, in all IE languages (e.g. Arabic SJD -> masjid isn’t really that different from “can” -> “cannery”).
I understand about reading & writing it, I was just curious about how it sounds these days.
Interesting. I more or less understand vowel & consonant shifts. A “v” can become a “p” or “f,” for instance. Or as in modern American Ebonics, “th” is increasingly becoming “f,” or “d” depending where it falls in the word.
Dio, I meant Pharasaic laymen, not just Pharasaic scholars. And the majority of the common folk were Pharisees by philosophy, weren’t they? (by this question mark I mean: that’s what I’s been taught as a fact, but you might have sources that say otherwise) I’d think that knowing to at least read Hebrew would be indispensable to the Pharasaic Jewish lifestyle even back then.
Ethnologue listing of Afro-Asiatic (“Hamito-Semitic”) languages
It’s my understanding that in the last centuries B.C.(E.) and the first century A.D./C.E., Aramaic was the vernacular language of the east Mediterranean littoral, including roughly Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and northwest Iraq (how far into Iraq it penetrated, I don’t know). Koiné Greek was the lingua franca of the entire Eastern Mediterranean, spoken in place of or in addition to the local vernacular, anywhere from Sicily east to the Aramaic area and perhaps beyond. In general, the Jewish populations of the Diaspora, in Alexandria, Asia Minor, and so on, spoke Greek as their everyday language; this is the main reason for the Septuagint having been created.
Jesus almost definitely spoke Aramaic with His disciples and in most of His sermons; there are a few instances where His exact words in Aramaic were preserved in the Gospels. He certainly knew Hebrew well enough to quote the Scriptures. There are a few instances where he spoke to people who were probable Greek speakers, though what language was used for the exchange is not recorded. The four Gospels were almost definitely originally composed in Greek, rendering what is alleged to be His direct speech in what is likely a Greek translation or paraphrase. (The early writer Papias claims that Matthew the Apostle collected the logia of Jesus in “the Hebrew tongue” (likely meaning Aramaic not Hebrew) – but the Gospel According to Matthew as we have it is neither a sayings-collection nor, apparently, translated from Aramaic or Hebrew.) It’s likely that most Jews outside the Holy Land even in the western half of the Empire spoke Greek rather than Latin; Romans, for example, addressed to a congregation of mostly-Jewish converts to Christianity in Rome, was written in Greek.
Philosophically, yes, most people followed one of the Pharisaic schools but (according to my sources) they relied on trained scholars to explicate the Law for them and to read and interpret scripture. Most people probably had some ceremonial knowledge of Hebrew but they weren’t literate enough to read the Torah themselves and they had little access to written material in any case. Copies of the books in the Tanakh (which were still in scroll form in the 1st Century) were expensive and scarce, generally kept in synagogues for use of whole communities and publicly read aloud by Rabbis. People did not generally have private copies of Biblical scrolls in their own households.
Galilee, in particular was very rural and its people were seen as particularly uneducated and unsophisticated by Judeans. They were kind of the Palestinian equivalents of “rednecks,” if you will. It’s one of the reasons that (according to the Gospels) Jesus’ authority as a teacher was greeted with skepticism in Jerusalem (it was perhaps analogous to how a truck driver from rural Alabama might be greeted by pointy-head, New York intellectuals). If Jesus was indeed a carpenter (the Greek word, tekton [literally “builder”] could also have indicated a stoneworker or bricklayer) Crossan claims that would have made him a member of the artisan class- a class which Crossan claims was a bare subsistence class, below even that of peasant farmers. A tekton from Galilee was as hick as you could get. This status may possibly have been played up for its mythic value (and its faint parallel to David, the shepherd) but if it were substantially true, then Jesus would have had little or no opportunity for a formal education during childhood. Theoretically, he could have trained with a Pharasaic school (or even with the Essenes) as an adult and the humbleness of his background may have also been exaggerated for effect, but statistically, the odds of a Galilean from the sub-peasant classes ever learning how to read were very small.
Some people would say that this particular guy wasn’t exactly ordinary, though. 
Excalibre writes:
> It makes me suspect that the Afro-Asiatic family might be the result of more
> recent divergence.
No, it’s generally believed that the Afro-Asiatic family began splitting up longer ago than Indo-European. Afro-Asiatic diverged about 9000 years ago. Indo-European diverged about 6000 years ago.
Pretty much. Here’s a little sample: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~nelc/hebrewbible.html
(though unheaded, the first image is tagged “dead sea scroll”).
Interestingly, at some point before that in history (don’t remember exactly when), Hebrew lost its own, native writing system - the current one was adapted from (wait for it) Aramaic.