Canter Bridge

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The coterie of Northwest Semitic dialects that we abbreviate as ‘Aramaic’ are collectively a staple of biblical and other historical research. Yet even though Aramaic is the second language of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and arguably the first language of Jesus, English-language teachers and learners have suffered from the absence of a pedagogically designed teaching grammar of Aramaic.

Until now. Fred Greenspahn has solved the problem. (Full disclosure: I am the translator of the Spanish edition of this work and have used it for several years to good effect at Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica).

In thirty-two chapters, the author introduces the student who already knows Biblical Hebrew to the biblical Aramaic texts in full, as well as selections from inscriptions, the Elephantine and Bar Kochba letters, Midrash, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.

The text is well formatted with lots of white space, a psychological help to the student of no small import. Though errors bedevil the Aramaic of even this second edition, they have been identified and will doubtless disappear in a third.

The exercises are derived from the texts under study, which in the biblical portions are mostly Daniel and Ezra-Nehemiah passages that have been scrubbed of their most troublesome features. A full answer key appears in the back of the book.

This work is a gift to teachers and students of Aramaic. The ever essential works of Alger Johns, Franz Rosenthal, and others are now liberated to play their proper role as brief but invaluable reference works.

It’s enough to make you doubt the decline of Western civilization.