Aram

Aram (Hebrew Aram, traditionally "highness, exalted") is at once a personal name and the name of a people and region. He appears first as the fifth son of Shem in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10:22), the eponymous father of the Arameans who spread across Syria and upper Mesopotamia. A second Aram is named as a grandson of Abraham's brother Nahor (Genesis 22:21), reflecting the close kinship between the family of Abraham and the Aramean tribes.

That kinship runs deep in the patriarchal story. Abraham's relatives settled in Aram-naharaim ("Aram of the two rivers," upper Mesopotamia) and Paddan-aram around Haran, and it was from there that wives were sought for the covenant line: Rebekah for Isaac, and Leah and Rachel for Jacob, daughters of Laban, who is repeatedly called "the Aramean" (Genesis 25:20; Genesis 28:5; Genesis 31:20). Jacob's twenty years of service in Aram so shaped Israel's self-understanding that the worshipper bringing his firstfruits confessed, "A wandering Aramean was my father" (Deuteronomy 26:5).

As a geographic and ethnic term, Aram designated the broad lands of Syria, appearing in several compound forms: Aram-naharaim (Mesopotamia), Aram-zobah and Aram-maacah (Aramean states north of Israel), and above all Aram-Damascus, the dominant Aramean kingdom of the period of the divided monarchy. The Arameans were both trading partners and persistent military adversaries of Israel — subdued by David (2 Samuel 8:5–6), a chronic threat to the northern kingdom under the kings of Damascus, and the homeland of Naaman the leprous commander healed by Elisha (2 Kings 5:1). Their later national history is treated under the Greek name for the region, Syria.

The name also enters the lineage of the Messiah. In the genealogies Aram (the Greek form of the Hebrew Ram) stands between Hezron and Amminadab among the forefathers of David and of Christ (Matthew 1:3–4; Luke 3:33; cf. Ruth 4:19). Most enduring of all is the legacy of the Aramean tongue: Aramaic became the common language of the ancient Near East, the language of portions of Daniel and Ezra, and the everyday speech of the Jews — and of Jesus himself — in the first century. Thus Aram threads through Scripture as the kindred of Israel through Shem and through the patriarchs, by turns a snare and an adversary, yet a people from whom wives of the covenant came, whose name appears in the Saviour's line, and whose language carried many of the very words of the Lord.