Unearthed in what was an artisan’s village 2.5 km from ancient Temple, inscribed column from 100 BCE features Aramaic, Hebrew, two of the languages used by Jerusalemites of the era ...

The penultimate verse of the Qaddish is for shlama rabba, two Aramaic words that mean “great peace.” The last verse is a prayer for shalom, the Hebrew word for peace: ...

That tradition claims that Aramaic (not Hebrew or Greek) is the key not merely to Jesus’ cultural background, but to hisipsissima verba, his very words, and thus an unmediated experience of him.

Hebrew, for them, was local. Aramaic truly got around—even to places where no one had ever actually spoken it, in the form of its alphabet, on which both Hebrew and Arabic writing were based.

Translations of ancient Aramaic and Hebrew texts have drastically improved. The combination of better translations and the Web has made a lot of very traditional Jewish texts accessible to the masses.

Hebrew itself, in its written form, uses the original Aramaic script. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are many Aramaic texts from the time of Jesus, so one can get a pretty good idea of what the ...

The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin — not to mention the spattering blood — speak ...