Aramaic

Aramaic belongs to the Northwest Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, closely related to Hebrew, and rose from a regional language of Aramean city-states in the early first millennium BCE to become the dominant administrative lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Persian empires successively, a status that spread Aramaic across the entire Near East for the better part of a thousand years and left it as the everyday spoken language of Judea by the time of Jesus, alongside Hebrew's continued role as a more restricted liturgical and scholarly language.

Aramaic exists in numerous historical dialects and later distinct branches, including Biblical Aramaic, the language of portions of the books of Daniel and Ezra, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the primary language of the Babylonian Talmud, Syriac, the literary Aramaic dialect of early Eastern Christianity, and Samaritan Aramaic, and several endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects survive today among small Assyrian, Chaldean and Jewish communities descended from these ancient linguistic communities. Aramaic's earliest attested inscriptions date to around the tenth century BCE, and the language passed through recognized historical stages including Old Aramaic, Imperial or Official Aramaic used administratively across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the later Middle Aramaic period from which Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac all descend.

Aramaic is widely accepted by scholars as the primary everyday spoken language of Jesus and first-century Judean and Galilean society, reflected in several Aramaic words and phrases preserved directly within the otherwise Greek New Testament text, including Jesus's reported cry from the cross and his address to Jairus's daughter, moments the Gospel writers apparently considered significant enough to preserve in the original language rather than only in Greek translation.

Jewish Babylonian Aramaic is the primary language of the Babylonian Talmud, compiled across several centuries by rabbis in Babylonian academies and remaining the single most influential text in the development of rabbinic Jewish law and interpretation, while Syriac Aramaic became the liturgical and theological language of the Church of the East and other Eastern Christian communities, producing an extensive body of early Christian biblical commentary, hymnody and monastic literature largely independent of Greek and Latin Christian traditions developing in parallel elsewhere in the late antique Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. Mandaic, a further distinct Aramaic dialect, remains the liturgical and scriptural language of the Mandaeans, a small Gnostic Baptist religious community historically centered in Iraq and Iran, whose sacred text, the Ginza Rabba, preserves one of the last living ritual uses of an Aramaic dialect outside Jewish and Christian contexts.