Why is part of the Old Testament written in Aramaic?

Question 1160

Most readers know that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the language of Abraham’s descendants and the tongue of Moses, David and the prophets. Fewer realise that a small but real portion of it was written in another language altogether, namely Aramaic. When this is first noticed it can come as a surprise, and it raises a fair question about why the Spirit of God led the writers of Scripture to set down part of his Word in a language other than the one we normally associate with Israel.

The answer turns out to be a window into the actual history through which God carried his people, and into the way he spoke to them in the circumstances where they found themselves. Far from being a problem for the trustworthiness of Scripture, the Aramaic sections show us a God who meets his people in the real world, in the languages they truly spoke and heard.

Where the Aramaic Is Found

The Aramaic portions of the Old Testament are not scattered at random but gathered in a few clear places. The largest stretch is found in the book of Daniel, where the text moves into Aramaic from the middle of the second chapter and continues through to the end of the seventh chapter. The book of Ezra contains two further sections in Aramaic, made up chiefly of official correspondence and decrees that passed between the Jewish community and the Persian authorities. There is a single verse in Jeremiah given in Aramaic, and two words in Genesis where Laban names a heap of stones in his own tongue while Jacob names it in Hebrew.

Taken together these passages amount to a few chapters out of the whole, so the great body of the Old Testament remains Hebrew. Yet the Aramaic is genuine Scripture, breathed out by God just as fully as the Hebrew around it, and the books that contain it were received without hesitation into the canon of the Hebrew Bible. The language of a passage has no bearing on whether it is the Word of God, and these sections were always honoured as inspired.

The Language of an Empire

To understand why these sections appear, we need to remember what Aramaic was. It was the language of the Aramean peoples to the north and east of Israel, and over the centuries it spread far beyond them. By the time of the great empires of Assyria, Babylon and Persia, Aramaic had become the common language of trade, diplomacy and administration across the whole of the Near East. It was the international tongue of the day, the language in which a Persian official in one province would write to a governor in another, much as a particular language serves that purpose in the modern world.

When the people of Judah were carried into exile in Babylon, they entered a world that conducted its public life in Aramaic. Over the generations of captivity and the long centuries that followed, Aramaic became the everyday speech of many ordinary Jews, while Hebrew remained the treasured language of the Scriptures and of worship. By the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the common people of Galilee and Judea spoke Aramaic, which is why a handful of his own words are preserved for us in that language, such as when he took the little girl by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cumi.”

Why Daniel and Ezra Use It

Once we see Aramaic as the language of the empires, the Aramaic sections of Scripture begin to make perfect sense. The book of Daniel is set in the courts of Babylon and Persia, among kings, officials and the wider Gentile world. The portion written in Aramaic deals largely with God’s dealings with those Gentile powers, including the great dream of the statue made of differing metals and the visions of the kingdoms that would rise and fall before the everlasting kingdom of God. It was fitting that this message, which concerned the nations and not Israel alone, should be set down in the language the nations could read.

The Aramaic in Ezra is just as natural, for it consists mainly of letters and decrees that genuinely passed between the returning Jews and the Persian kings and their servants. These were official documents drawn up in the working language of the empire, and Ezra reproduces them in their original form rather than translating them into Hebrew. This is the mark of a careful and honest record, preserving the very words of the correspondence as they stood. The change of language in these books is therefore tied closely to their subject matter and their setting, and it strengthens rather than weakens our confidence in them.

A Help, Not a Problem

Some have tried to use the presence of Aramaic as an argument against the early dating of Daniel, claiming that the form of the language points to a much later age. Yet the kind of Aramaic found in Daniel fits well within the period of the exile and the Persian empire, and the official Aramaic of that era is precisely what we would expect from a man writing in the Babylonian and Persian courts. The language, properly examined, supports the setting the book claims for itself rather than undermining it.

There is something quietly reassuring in all of this. The God who inspired the Scriptures did not hand down a book sealed off from the world, written in a single sacred tongue that no ordinary person used. He spoke to his people in the languages they actually heard around them, weaving his eternal truth into the real history of empires and exiles and returning captives. The Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra is a small reminder that the Word of God came to real people in a real time and place.

It is also worth noting how seamlessly the inspired writers move between the two languages without any sense of strain. Daniel begins in Hebrew, slips into Aramaic as the Babylonian wise men address the king in that very tongue, carries on in Aramaic through the chapters that deal with the Gentile kingdoms, and then returns to Hebrew for the visions that concern Daniel’s own people. The choice of language follows the subject and the audience in a way that is natural and deliberate, the mark of a writer at home in both worlds. This is not the clumsy stitching together of later editors but the work of a man who lived and served at the heart of a foreign empire while never forgetting the God of his fathers.

Aramaic in the Days of Jesus

The story of Aramaic does not end with the Old Testament, for the language went on shaping the life of God’s people right up to the time of our Lord. By then Hebrew had largely become the language of the scholars and the scrolls, while Aramaic was the speech of the home and the street in Galilee and Judea. In the synagogue, when the Hebrew Scriptures were read aloud, a translator would often give the sense in Aramaic so that the ordinary people could understand, and these spoken renderings grew in time into the written paraphrases we call the Targums.

This is why the Gospels preserve a handful of Aramaic words on the lips of Jesus, each one a little window into the language he spoke day by day. He took the dead girl by the hand and said, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” He looked up to heaven and groaned, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.” From the cross he cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,” the opening words of a psalm in his mother tongue. The Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra and the Aramaic of these sayings of Jesus are part of one continuous story, the story of a God who drew near to his people in the words they actually used.

Sister Languages, One Revelation

It helps to understand that Hebrew and Aramaic were closely related, two branches of the same family of tongues, near enough that a speaker of one could often follow much of the other. They shared a similar script and a great deal of common vocabulary, so the move from Hebrew into Aramaic within a single book was not the jarring shift it might seem to us, who think of the two as wholly foreign languages. A Jew of the exile and the return would have been at home in both, hearing the Scriptures in Hebrew and conducting daily affairs in Aramaic.

This closeness is part of why the change of language never troubled the men who gathered and guarded the Hebrew Scriptures. They did not treat the Aramaic sections as foreign intrusions but as part of the one revelation God had given, and they preserved them with the same care they gave to the Hebrew. The unity of the message was never in question, for the same God was speaking whether the words were Hebrew or Aramaic, and the truth he revealed ran seamlessly across both. The varied languages of the Old Testament serve a single voice, the voice of the Lord calling his people to know him.

So, now what?

When you next read Daniel or Ezra, you can read with a fuller understanding of what lies behind the page. The shift into Aramaic is not a flaw or an oddity but a faithful record of how God spoke to his people in the world of the great empires, in the very language of the courts and the decrees. It is one more sign that Scripture is rooted in genuine history and not invented out of the air.

Let it also encourage you about the heart of God. He is not distant or guarded with his truth. He came down into the languages of ordinary people, and he would later send his Son to speak the everyday Aramaic of Galilee to fishermen and farmers and tax collectors. The same God still speaks plainly today through his written Word, and he longs for you to hear and understand him. Take up the whole of Scripture, Hebrew and Aramaic alike, as the trustworthy voice of the Lord who meets us where we are.

“He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding.” Daniel 2:21