Did Jesus read the Tanakh in Aramaic?

Question

The NT written in Greek masks to some extent details about the life of Jesus. But when the gospels go through the effort of quoting Jesus directly in his final moments, they are left translating His words from the Aramaic to the Greek reader.

It would be reasonable therefore to infer based on the region Jesus grew up in and other historical clues that Jesus spoke Aramaic and that at least some of the eye witnesses immediately in the vicinity of the cross both heard and understood He was speaking Aramaic corroborating what He said in Aramaic.

Would it be too much to infer that the Scriptures Jesus had access to were also in Aramaic? Or his preferred language for reading the Tanakh was in Aramaic? Would this make the surviving manuscripts in Aramaic more or less authoritative? Jesus quoting psalm 22:1 in this case.

(Or was Jesus not quoting the psalmist, it just so happened to coincide with the psalmist? I think unlikely because of the double “Eli, Eli” or “My God, My God”. If He was merely trying to say, God why have you forsaken me, I doubt there would have been a double, “My God” given the excruciating pain of breathing let alone speaking).

Answer 1

Did Jesus read the Tanakh in Aramaic? Probably not.

Targums

As Claude Tresmontant observed,

"There were oral translations in Aramaic of the sacred books written in Hebrew; they were called targumin. A translator in the synagogue would read aloud, translating a passage from the Torah or one of the prophets. But in the era before the destruction of the Temple, putting these translations into writing was formally prohibited." (The Hebrew Christ p. 5)

So the Tanakh in the local synagogues would generally be a document written in Hebrew, from which Aramaic oral translations were sometimes given.

The Septuagint

As Steve noted in a prior post, there are various instances in the Gospels where an Old Testament passage is quoted, but the reading is found in the LXX and not in any known Hebrew text. This, combined with effective scholarship suggesting the widespread knowledge of Greek in first century Galilee (e.g. here & here), serves as evidence for the claim that Jesus at least sometimes taught in Greek.

It is also possible that some of the LXX passages found in the Gospels are Greek translations of scriptural teachings Jesus gave in Aramaic or Hebrew. For a helpful summary of arguments that Jesus spoke both Aramaic & Hebrew see Frank Luke's analysis on this site here.

How to lose a job as a translator in 5 minutes

As a translator, I have learned that when translating a statement well-known in the target language, you do not free-translate the passage. A good translator will refer to an already accepted translation. For example, if I translated "veni, vidi, vici" as "I arrived, I saw, I conquered", I would lose the confidence of my audience, because everybody knows it's supposed to be rendered "I came, I saw, I conquered."

It would be both natural and expected that, where Jesus quoted the Hebrew scriptures verbatim, an author writing in Greek would usually refer to the accepted translation of the passage, found in the LXX. When the scriptures were paraphrased, a free-translation may be more acceptable.

Conclusion

We should not rule out the likelihood that Jesus was familiar with the written & spoken Hebrew Tanakh, the written & spoken Greek Septuagint, and had heard oral renderings of the Tanakh in Aramaic.

Perhaps the plainest (and admittedly ever-so-slightly over-simplified) rendering of the trilingual nature of Jesus' world I have encountered is that Aramaic was the language of the home, Hebrew was the language of the synagogue, and Greek was the language of the marketplace.

Answer 2

Based on the text of the NT it is difficult to be confident on this point. As the texts are written in Koine Greek, the vast majority of Tanakh quotes we have are in Greek, and frequently carry over peculiarities from the LXX, and show very few indications of being directly translated from semitic texts. Many references containing such peculiarities are accredited to Jesus, and so if we take these quotations to be exactly as Jesus spoke them (and not reconstructed later), then these would suggest Jesus most likely read and taught from the Septuagint:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed,” (Luke 4:18)

Recovery of sight is only found in the LXX, and isn't there in most modern translations of Isaiah 61.

Similarly:

“Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him. "Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,“ ‘From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?” Matthew 21:16 NIV

This references Psalm 8:2, "Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies...", and only has the nuance of calling forth praise in the LXX.

So, no - the evidence would seem to present Jesus as primarily teaching from the Greek translation, or else if he did teach from a Hebrew or Aramaic version then it was reconstructed using the LXX later on.

Answer 3

Jesus can't have been reading the scriptures in Aramaic, since that was forbidden. The targums were oral during Jesus's lifetime. If you believe in the literal truth of the bible, then you are going to look at Mark 2:25 and Luke 4:16 and say that Jesus was literate, but most scholars think that the historical Jesus was illiterate, as were almost all of his followers. He would therefore know the Hebrew bible solely through hearing the oral targums. When he said something that included a quote or paraphrase of these, people would remember, "Oh, yes, when Jesus was debating about X, he quoted verse Y from Isaiah." This oral memory was most likely preserved in Aramaic by Galileans. This tradition probably remained oral (or in fragmentary written form like the hypothetical Q source) until a generation after his death (and some years after the Pauline epistles), at which point the sayings were codified in Greek by the evangelists and rendered authoritative. When writing a Greek gospel for a gentile audience, they would at that point look up verse Y in the septuagint, to make sure they were getting it right, and write that down as what Jesus said.

Yes, the fact that the passions of Mark and Matthew quote Jesus's last words in Aramaic is an obvious confirmation that he spoke Aramaic. If there hadn't already been an oral tradition saying that these were his last words, then there is no way that the author of Mark would have painstakingly written down the Aramaic words, transliterated into Greek, and then supplied the translation for his gentile audience.

Or was Jesus not quoting the psalmist, it just so happened to coincide with the psalmist?

A very large percentage of Jesus's words in the gospels are quotes from the Hebrew bible. He was either quoting from memory or else other people embellished some of his sayings by packing extra authoritative quotations into them. Both Jesus, in the gospels, and Paul, in the epistles, say a variety of things that fall on a spectrum from literal quotes of scripture to what could be loose allusions. This all gets extra blurry because the OT is in Hebrew and the NT in Greek.

Answer 4

Jesus did not read the Tanakh at all (except when he was called on to recite a few verses in the weekly Synagogue readings), like all others, he heard it read to him, he did not read it. And what he heard was both Hebrew first, and then the Aramaic translation second. He heard both.

Personal reading of the Tanakh was not done at the time, unless you were a member of a special scribal family. This was before the Gutenberg press, and we shouldn't assume that Jesus walked around with a copy of the Bible or that he went to a local library and checked out a copy. Let's not backproject modern customs to that period.

Once a week, people attended a local Synagogue and

• listened to the scriptures be read to them in the original Hebrew, and then
• listened to the scriptures be translated to them in their native Aramaic.

Jesus would have heard both.