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The Family That Carries Four Scriptures

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The Family That Carries Four Scriptures

No other language family in the world carries as many living scriptural languages as this one. Hebrew is the language of the Tanakh and of Jewish liturgy, and it was revived as a spoken language in the twentieth century after some seventeen centuries in which it was principally read and prayed rather than spoken. Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an and, for the tradition that reads it, the language in which the revelation was given rather than a translatable vehicle for it.

Ge'ez is the liturgical language of Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christianity, which preserves in its canon books that survive nowhere else in a complete form. Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian, is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the language of the Nag Hammadi library. Aramaic and its descendant Syriac carry parts of the Hebrew Bible, a large body of Christian literature, and the scriptures of the Mandaeans.

Four of these belong to the Semitic branch, and the fifth, Coptic, is Egyptian. That concentration is the reason a reader working through the religious literature of the Near East keeps meeting the same roots in different scripts. It is not evidence that the traditions borrowed from each other, though many of them did. It is evidence that they were composed by neighbours speaking related languages.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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