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Question: How did Isaac and Jacob become Hebrew if Abraham and Sarah were Aramaic?
Google: Later, as Hebrew was becoming gradually restricted to liturgical use, Aramaic replaced it in everyday life, and was adopted as the language of the great Commentaries of the Bible—the Mishna and the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds—, before the spread of Arabic as a result of the Islamic conquest.
Is Aramaic the same as Hebrew?
Among the Jews, Aramaic was used by the common people, while Hebrew remained the language of religion and government and of the upper class. Jesus and the Apostles are believed to have spoken Aramaic, and Aramaic-language translations (Targums) of the Old Testament circulated.
When did Aramaic replace Hebrew?
Western dialects of the Post-Achaemenid period
They are quite distinct from the eastern dialects and Imperial Aramaic. Aramaic came to coexist with Canaanite dialects, eventually completely displacing Phoenician in the first century BC and Hebrew around the turn of the fourth century AD.
Wikipedia:
History[edit]
Historically and originally, Aramaic was the language of the Arameans, a Semitic-speaking people of the region between the northern Levant and the northern Tigris valley. By around 1000 BC, the Arameans had a string of kingdoms in what is now part of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and the fringes of southern Mesopotamia (Iraq). Aramaic rose to prominence under the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC), under whose influence Aramaic became a prestige language after being adopted as a lingua franca of the empire by Assyrian kings, and its use spread throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant and parts of Asia Minor, Arabian Peninsula and Ancient Iran. At its height, Aramaic, having gradually replaced many earlier fellow Semitic languages, was spoken in several variants all over historical territories of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, parts of southeast and south central Turkey, parts of northwest Iran and the southern Caucasus.[8][19][10]
According to the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b), the language spoken by Adam — the Bible's first human — was Aramaic.[20]
Aramaic was the language of Jesus,[21][22][23] who spoke the Galilean dialect during his public ministry, as well as the language of several sections of the Hebrew Bible, including parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra, and also the language of the Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible.[24][25][26] It is also the language of the Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and Zohar.
The scribes of the Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy had also used Aramaic, and this practice was subsequently inherited by the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire (605–539 BC), and later by the Achaemenid Empire (539–330 BC).[27] Mediated by scribes that had been trained in the language, highly standardized written Aramaic (named by scholars as Imperial Aramaic) progressively also became the lingua franca of public life, trade and commerce throughout the Achaemenid territories.[28] Wide use of written Aramaic subsequently led to the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet and (as logograms) some Aramaic vocabulary in the Pahlavi scripts, which were used by several Middle Iranian languages (including Parthian, Middle Persian, Sogdian, and Khwarazmian).[29]
Some variants of Aramaic are also retained as sacred languages by certain religious communities. Most notable among them is Classical Syriac, the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity. It is used by several communities, including the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Maronite Church, and also the Saint Thomas Christians (Native Christians) and Syrian Christians (K[Q]naya) of Kerala, India.[30][31][32] One of Aramaic liturgical dialects was Mandaic,[33] which besides becoming a vernacular (Neo-Mandaic) also remained the liturgical language of Mandaeism.[34] Syriac was also the liturgical language of several now-extinct gnostic faiths, such as Manichaeism. Neo-Aramaic languages are still spoken in the 21st century as a first language by many communities of Syriac Christians, Jews (in particular, the Jews of Kurdistan), and Mandaeans of the Near East,[35][36] most numerously by Christian Syriacs (Syriac-speakers: ethnic Arameans, Assyrians and Chaldeans), and with numbers of fluent speakers ranging approximately from 1 million to 2 million, with the main languages among Assyrians being Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (590,000 speakers), Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (240,000 speakers) and Turoyo (100,000 speakers); in addition to Western Neo-Aramaic (21,700) which persists in only three villages in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains region in western Syria.[37] They have retained use of the once dominant lingua franca despite subsequent language shifts experienced throughout the Middle East.
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