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Copyright

Holger Gzella;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 747–770

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

Christian Palestinian Aramaic between Greek and Arabic

  • Holger Gzella (author)
Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World(pp. 747–770)
The study explores Christian Palestinian Aramaic as a linguistic tradition that developed in Byzantine Palestine alongside Greek and Arabic. It identifies its roots in a Western Aramaic vernacular spoken in the region and examines its historical context, linguistic features, and adaptations. The corpus consists mostly of translations from Greek, highlighting significant lexical borrowings and idiosyncratic syntax, such as periphrastic verb constructions. The article traces evidence of Arabic substrate influence in pre-Islamic times, including phonological shifts and loanwords, reflecting interactions between Arabic- and Aramaic-speaking Christians. The emergence of Christian Palestinian Aramaic as a written language is attributed to the need for localised religious texts for rural, Aramaic-speaking communities, distinct from Greek or Syriac traditions. The study situates the language within the socio-linguistic changes following the spread of Arabic as the dominant vernacular, emphasising its role in the region’s multilingual landscape.

Contributors

Holger Gzella

(author)
Professor of Old Testament at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Holger Gzella (PhD, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster) is Professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His research is situated at the crossroads of Semitic Philology, Hebrew Bible, and the broader linguistic and cultural history of Syria-Palestine between ca. 1200 BCE and 700 CE, with particular interests in multilingualism in Antiquity, the Achaemenid Official Aramaic literary and administrative tradition and its offshoots throughout the Near East, and scribal culture in general (including the history of scholarship as its modern counterpart). Some of his best-known scholarly works are A Cultural History of Aramaic: From the Beginnings to the Advent of Islam (Brill, 2014) and Aramaic: A History of the First World Language (Eerdmans, 2021).