Shlama Akhi Dave,
Dave Wrote:What sayest thou ???
I sayeth, ask modern Assyrians what language they speak and 9 out of 10 will tell you "the
Assyrian language."
Linguists, of course, will laugh at that answer. There is no such thing as the "Assyrian language" - ancient Assyrians spoke Akkadian and modern Assyrians speak neo-Aramaic.
People will tend to identify the language they speak with their particular ethnicity.
That Aramaic was called the "Hebrew tongue" by Hebrews, or by those descibing what the Hebrews at the time spoke, should be expected.
If you ask some people in the middle east what language Americans speak - they will look at you funny and say "the American language, of course!"
Well, as silly as it seems on the surface - you DO speak the American language. It is different from the language spoken in England. Only technically-minded linguists would insist to call it the "American dialect" of English. (or, "Australian dialect", "Canadian dialect", etc.)
If people spoke Hebrew at the time, Akhi, there would have been no need for the numerous Aramaic Targums of scripture. There would have been no need to pen the Talmuds (both of them, the Babylonian and the Jerusalem) in Aramaic - they would have written these things in Hebrew.
Even their script changed when they came back from Babylon, Akhi. They no longer wrote in Paleo-Hebrew, but in the Aramaic script we all recognize today.
Again, I ask: who would Matthew have intended as his audience for a Hebrew Gospel? A few dozen priests, maybe, who still understood it?
You've heard that modern Hebrew was resurrected sometime last century after the return of the Jews to the land of Israel. I ask you: when did Hebrew die out, finally? There was a point in which it did - otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to "resurrect" it! <!-- s
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