Aramaeans, were seated in historic times between the Babylonians and Canaanites, the area of their distribution extending from the foot of Lebanon and Hermon in a north-easterly direction as far as Mesopotamia, where "Aram of the two rivers" forms their eastern-most province. Their immigration into these regions forms the third epoch of the Semitic migrations, which probably lasted from 1600 B.C. down to 600.
The Aramaic states had no great stability. The most important of them was the kingdom of Damascus, which at a certain period was so dangerous an enemy to northern Israel. In the end, however, the Aramaean dynasties were crushed, like the two Israelitish kingdoms, between the upper and nether millstones of Babylon and Egypt. In the time of the successors of Alexander, there arose in these regions the Syrian kingdom; which in turn gave place to the Roman power.
But linguistically the Aramaeans conquered the whole of Western Asia. In the course of the first millennium B.C. Aramaic became the language of commerce and diplomacy, as Babylonian had been during the second. It was only the rise of Greek as a universal language which put a term to these conquests of the Aramaic.
In the year 701 B.C. Aramaic had not yet penetrated to Judaea. When the rabshakeh (officer) sent by Sennacherib addressed the envoys of Hezekiah in Hebrew, they begged him to speak Aramaic in order that the men upon the wall might not understand. [1] For the post-exilic period the Aramaic edicts in the Book of Ezra and inscriptions on Persian coins show that throughout wide districts of the new empire Aramaic had made good its position as the language of common intercourse. Its domain extended from the Euxine southwards as far as Egypt, and even into Egypt itself. Samaria and the Hauran adopted it. Only the Greek towns and Phoenicia resisted.
The influence of Aramaic upon Jewish literature begins to be noticeable about the year 600. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, writing in a foreign land in an Aramaic environment, are the first witnesses to its supremacy. In the northern part of the country, owing to the immigration of foreign colonists after the destruction of the northern kingdom, it had already gained a hold upon the common people. In the Book of Daniel, written in the year 167 B.C., the Hebrew and Aramaic languages alternate. Perhaps, indeed, we ought to assume an Aramaic ground-document as the basis of this work.
At what time Aramaic became the common popular speech in the post-exilic community we cannot exactly discover. Under Nehemiah "Judaean," that is to say, Hebrew, was still spoken in Jerusalem; in the time of the Maccabees Aramaic seems to have
- ↑ 2 Kings xviii. 26 ff.
