Old Testament Languages

The OT was written primarily in Biblical Hebrew with sections in Aramaic. Hebrew is a Semitic language closely related to Phoenician and Ugaritic, using a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two characters with vowels indicated by diacritical marks (the Masoretic pointing system) added by Jewish scribes between the sixth and tenth centuries AD. Biblical Hebrew passed through several stages: archaic poetry (Gen. 49; Ex. 15; Deut. 32-33; Judg. 5), classical prose Hebrew (the main narrative and prophetic literature), later biblical Hebrew reflecting Aramaic influence (Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles, Esther), and post-biblical Hebrew. The Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1947-1956) provide the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts, predating the Masoretic tradition by approximately one thousand years and confirming the text's substantial stability.

Aramaic sections appear in Genesis 31:47 (two words), Jeremiah 10:11 (one verse), and most substantially in Ezra 4:8-6:18 and 7:12-26, and Daniel 2:4-7:28 — passages addressed to or concerning the Babylonian and Persian courts, reflecting Aramaic's status as the imperial lingua franca of the ancient Near East from the seventh century BC onward. By the NT period, Aramaic was the common spoken language of Palestinian Jews, reflected in Jesus's Aramaic words preserved in the Gospels (talitha koum, Mark 5:41; ephphatha, Mark 7:34; Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, Mark 15:34). The Septuagint (LXX) — the Greek translation begun in the third century BC — became the Bible of the Greek-speaking diaspora and is the primary Scripture used by NT authors in their OT quotations.