Additional Details\n\nMar 24, 2006 at 9:11 am\nThank you for your responses, but I must elaborate further. I have different books and cd's on paleo-hebrew or archaic hebrew. Most differ. But I need the Hebrew that was spoken about 1000 B.C. or that Hebrew that was restored during the Maccabean Dynasty. This is known as Middle Hebrew not Modern which is Hebrew-Aramaic mixed with other European Languages. The Oldest Biblical scrolls contain archaic symbols which unlike American letters have many meanings and are pure;untampered with. Thanks
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Most major Universities have a Jewish studies/oriental studies/religious studies department where you can take a course in Biblical Hebrew. THE Place to learn is JTS - see http://www.jtsa.edu/progs/bib/bible.pdf which trains most US Jewish studies academics.\n\nAnother option is to take some time and come to Israel. The Hebrew University has an excellent overseas school with summer courses (if you can't take a whole year or semester) see http://overseas.huji.ac.il/sum_course_lang_bib.php\n\nI would think that Christian Bible Colleges also offer such classes, but I have no experience there
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The Holy Scriptures were originally written in Hebrew and Greek, of which physical manuscripts actually exist. I cannot remember where they are located, but some texts are located in museums.\n\nTo preserve the text of the Holy Scriptures, exact copies were carefully penned by hand from the orginals (manuscript [manual script - written by hand]) - symbol by symbol (the individuals who copied them dared not alter anything; if "one" symbol was wrong, the whole manuscript was discarded).\n\nThe Bible is from the Greek word "biblios" - or books; written over a period of 1,500 years by over 40 different men. Archeologists actually look at the Bible as a historical document, and use it as a reference; because it is a record "of living history" that reveals the names and locations of people who actually lived thousands of years ago.\n\nIf you research the subject of "Bible Archeology" you will discover that the "physical evidence" of things that are referenced in the Bible actually existed. This reinforces the accuracy of what is written.\n\nNow any historical document has to be taken on "faith" - even books and newspapers written 200 years ago. They were written by people who lived in the past and are accepted as something that is true; the Bible is no different.\n\nWhat makes the scriptures "holy" is not men, but God. In that the "holy scriptures" were "God-breathed" or inspired by God.\n\nhttp://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/2Pe/2Pe001.html#21\n\n2 Peter 1:\n\n16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. 18 And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount. 19 We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: 20 Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. 21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake [as they were] moved by the Holy Ghost.\n\nThe Apostle Peter wrote a letter about an event he witnessed himself, where he actually heard God "literally" speak.\n\nhttp://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Mat/Mat017.html#5\n\nMatthew 17:\n\n1 And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, 2 And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. 3 And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him. 4 Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. 5 While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him. 6 And when the disciples heard [it], they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. 7 And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid. 8 And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.  9 And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead. \n\nNotice that Christ took three disciples with Him. Christ knew what was about to happen, and He made sure that there were three men there to witness it. This is according to a law written in the Old Testament about requiring the testimony of at least two or three witnesses to verify the truth of a claim.\n\nDeuteronomy 17:6 At the mouth of
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First of all, no one speaks ancient Greek or Hebrew anymore, so there will always be some debate to translation.  \n\nSecond, the translators of the New World Translation are all Jehovah's Witnesses.  Part of the belief system of the Jehovah Witnesses (and part of what makes it a cult) is that if any non-JW tries to convince you of anything they are "from the devil, and should not be listened to."  So it isn't that they haven't told the translators about the errors, it is that the translators don't listen.  \n\nThird, the "scholars" you speak of don't have the qualifications to translate the Bible.  They use their ideology, not their intellect to make the statement that there are "no errors."\n\nFourth, if the "scholars" were doing such a great job of translating, why don't all the other scholars who study ancient Greek and Hebrew come up with at least SOME of the same conclusions, in fact why do ALL of them disagree?\n\nFifth, if the New World Translation has no errors, why can a simple Greek student like myself find errors?  If you believe the New World Translation has no errors, you have never taken Greek!\n\nSixth, Scholars who have actually done the translating on every translation (with a few exceptions where ideology got in the way, like the NWT) have worked very hard to make sure there were no translation errors, so your argument is invalid.\n\n\nBTW - Translating error - John 1:1, if it should be translated "the Word was a God" because of the lack of a definite article before the word translated God (here the word is Theos), you had better insert the word "a" before God in verses 6,12, and 18 of the same chapter to read, "There arose a man that was sent forth as a representative of a god," "...to them he gave authority to become a god's children," and, "No man has seen a god at any time," for there is no definite article in front of God in any of these verses, either.  If you don't believe me, look it up.
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1.   Like us, the Israelis had many books, including reference books, which were not necesssarily in the inspired canon.  It is as if a book today were to refer to a history book or an encyclopedia, or official government documents.\nOf couse they did not have as many books as we do, as they did not have the printing press to reproduce them.\nAs there were not a large number of copies of such books, it is very possible that they were destroyed, whether by natural aging process, or by weather, or by invaders taking the israelites into captivity.\n2.  Why is this statement always expressed with a question?\nIn many languages , (greek, latin) , the "is it not"? form is used as an emphasis for an affirmation:  "Of course it is .... " is the meaning.  I presume this is the case in Hebrew.
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Berashith bera alhim ath Hashamim vath Aretz...ve Aretz "Tohu Bohu"...this is Anglicized Hebrew obcourse(please pardon that I do not have a Hebrew font)...Translation:In the beginning created Alhim(Elohim) the heavens and the Earth...and the Earth was "tohu bohu"...most interesting this "tohu bohu"...as it is a Chaldean phrase...that we translate as "without shape and form"...yet very mysterious...and this phrase is never again repeated in the Torah (the Hebrew original of the Old Testament)...Not the degenerated form translated to Greek then English Guttenburg St.James editions...that so many feel they "possess" when they have never even begun contemplating "The Beauty of the Word"\n\n  Of interest also...Elohim(or Alhim)...The same that Christ called on the cross as "Eloh"....the "him" suffix implies both the feminine and a plural host...\n\n  The "tohu bohu" formless void has some paralels in the Sanskrit "chit sat tat"...suchness thatness more or less...\n\n  As it seems to me,you are contemplating very core matters,that I hope you find as rewarding as I have...Even Jesus' parables were packed full of layers of contemplation more accessible by the Hebrew alphabet he revered...Gimel for example...the Hebrew "G"...translates as "camel"...and I have seen many wealthy men threading the eyes of needles by this path..
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Yes it had. The rosetta stone had 3 languages written on it. The old the heiroglyphs had corresponding texts and trully let it be deciphered.\n\nIt is true the phonetics is a question but the same thing for hebrew. Who is to say mayim is not miyam. We assume its mayim because of the remaining few speakers who kept it alive. But sephardic hebrew was quite different from ashkenazic hebrew.\n\nThe sentence "The dog ran up the hill". In hebrew or egyptian would be "th dg rn xp th hll". We know what those words are but. It could be pronounced by people who never heard it "tho dag run op tho hall".\n\nWe may not know how to correctly speak ancient egyptian but the translation are known.
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My son might be interested. He recently returned from Hebrew U. in Jerusalem where he studied OT Hebrew....email me and i will get you his email address.....
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Doesn't get much older than this (though a bit):\n\nhttp://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html\n\nhttp://www.omniglot.com/writing/phoenician.htm
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Nice book. (If you’re a sadist)\n\n\n(edit)\nWhy would the old testament be in the book if this god decided to change his cruel, voilent and hatefull ways. Then you shouldn't present the old testament to me. If I tell you "Hey man, here is the word or GOD, the creator of all the universe! He is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-present!!!! ..But why then is there a part in his word that doesn't apply to our time?? I thought he is all-present which would mean his word will be timeless.
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The KJV was meticulously translated.  By man.  And, no surprise, it isn't perfect.\nThere IS no perfect translation because, even if you have a Hebrew, Greek or Chaldean lexicon, you don't have the meaning of the words from 2,000 years ago.  Meanings change.  Take the word "gay" for example - means something VERY different today than it did 20 years ago.\nWithout taking the time to learn the original languages, then do have the lexicons as well as a Strongs (or other) Concordance.  Read the same passages in different versions for richer comprehension.  A passage read from the KJV, the NIV and The Message takes on new dimension.\nRead it - and read it sloooowly and patiently!  Read it reguarly.  And read it again and again.  What had no relevance (seemingly) last month can suddenly leap out at you today.
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The best way you can find out what the bible says in "real terms" is to read it in Hebrew. That is the original language  it was written in. I find it useful when reading to have The Exhaustive concorance of the Bible near by.
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Basic answer  -- the languages have many similarities for TWO reaons --   an ancient COMMON ancestry, and much CONTACT through the millennia.\n\nThe three languages you listed -- Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic-- all go back to one ancient "root" language we might call "Common Semitic".  This is the starting place for understanding why a speaker of one language may understand, or at least easily learn, another of the languages.  It's a bit like French, Italian and Spanish speakers whose languages all go back to Latin.\n\nNow much of the ancient historical relationship amongst the different Semitic languages is obscure, and some of it is highly debated, since that 'language history' has to be reconstructed based on clues left in the languages (or in written records of earlier forms of the languages).     The "family tree" model also has some significant weaknesses (see below), but is still useful for drawing a rough picture.\n\nHere's a sketch:\n\n1) HEBREW and Aramaic are fairly closely related, coming from two 'subbranches' of part of the large tree of Semitic.  "Aramaic" actually covers a diversity of dialects.    Hebrew is a "Canaanite" language (the last remaining), and was spoken by the 'people of Israel' up to the time of the Babylonian Captivity in the 6th century B.C..   (The precise beginnings of Hebrew are murky.)\n\nThese two subbranches are the main representatives of what are usually called the "Northwest Semitic languages", though in more recent systems they may also be called "North Central Semitic" languages.\n\n2) ARAMAIC - Historically we know that various types of Aramaic were spoken in Syria (a region called "Aram" in the first millennium)-- in the lands between the Mediterranean coast and Mesopotamia.   These lands and peoples came under the control of the Assyrians ("Neo-Assyrian Empire"), then the Babylonians ("Neo-Babylonian Empre" of Nebuchadnezzar, etc), and later the (non-Semitic) Persians.   But rather than these peoples adopting the language of their Mesopotamian conquerors (esp. the "Neo-Assyrian" and "Neo-Babylonian" dialects of the Eastern Semitic language scholars call "Akkadian"),  Aramaic itself became the lingua franca of these empires, and eventually many of the legal documents were written in Aramaic.  (Persia continued this practice.)  [Note that "Neo-Babylonian" is NOT Aramaic, but the dialect of Akkadian.]\n\nLeading members of the Hebrew-speaking peoples of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah were carried into exile by the Assyrians & Babylonians.  When their descendants returned they brought the Aramaic language back with them, though they continued to use Hebrew for religious purposes.  (Because these returnees were chiefly from the former Kingdom of Judah, they were called "Judahites", from which we get the word "Jews" ["Juedisch" /"Yiddish" in German]. )\n\nAramaic dialects of various sorts continued to dominate the region for many centuries (though Greek was also used for various purposes after the rise of the Greek Empire and esp its Mesopotamain offshoot, the Seleucids).  In the early centuries of the church the later Aramaic dialect/language known as Syriac  was dominant (hence one of the earliest translations of the New Testament is the Syriac).\n\n3) Another Semitic language, ARABIC, swept across the region and displaced most of the Aramaic dialects with the rise of Islam and Arab conquest (though a few small pockets preserved Aramaic, and a handful of "Neo-Aramaic" dialects survive to this day).   But what exactly is the relationship of this Semitic language, esp. to Aramaic?\n\nThe "family tree" explanation has shifted a bit over the years.  Arabic used to be classified with "Southern Semitic" languages (including Southern Arabian and, more dis
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The bible was written over thousands of years, most of the Old Testament in Hebrew (parts in Aramaic), and the New Testament written in Greek. \nThe problem is that languages change with time and misuse, so old books need retranslating to maintain accuracy (i.e. does the translation mean to a modern reader in the translated language what it did to a contemporary reader in the ancient language).\nModern Greek is different from 1st century Greek. Modern Hebrew is different from ancient Hebrew. US English is different from UK English. Egyptian arabic is different from Modern Standard Arabic.\nwww.biblegateway.com has 19 English translations plus lots of other languages, including Arabic. Most translators work from the oldest texts available in the original languages. Some of these are very, very old.\nFor a demo of some of the difficulties translators face, paste a paragraph into http://babel.altavista.com/tr, ask it to translate it into a different language, then cut & paste it back in to translate it back into the start language and see what you get.\nThere is some useful stuff about bible translation on www.ibs.org.\nIn the 2nd letter from the apostle Paul to Timothy chapter 3 he wrote:-\n    14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it,\n    15 and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.\n    16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,\n    17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.\n\nFind an up to date translation (e.g. NIV or NKJV in English) or Arabic if you find it easier, read it with an open mind and you will be blessed.\n\nShukran for your question.
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you have two ways of looking at this ...\nbiblically and non biblically , so i will give you both\n\nbiblically it is said that God gave us different languages at the towers of Babel\n\nnon biblically .... when the world spilt millions of years ago , we all went different ways and learned to speak differently in the small communities we belonged to
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Hi and thanks for a great question. I don't know how much you know about the history of the bible, but let me give you a quick review of the Catholic bible. Essentially, the Catholic Bible used for many years was a translation made with the best texts available back in the 1600's. \n\nSince that time, the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls has provided us with many more copies of the original text and therefore many translators have access to the mateiral and are able to produce more "modern" translations (the thees and thous tend to confuse rather than clarify for me). The best thing would be to learn Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and read the original manuscripts yourself, but short of that, you can read different modern translations to get a better sense of what the original. \n\nFor example, compare this same verse in four translations:\nhttp://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1;&version=31;\nhttp://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1;&version=49;\nhttp://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1;&version=51;\nhttp://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%201:1;&version=46;\n\nNow with that said, I prefer to read some of the more modern translations as I said because it becomes clearer to me when I read it. I have provided some links to Catholic approved translations which I think you might find helpful. However, my suggestion is to pick one up, read your favorite passages (or your least favorite ;-) and see which one you like. \n\nIn particular, I found the New Living Translation and the Contemporary English Version to be very helpful especially for reading parts of the old testament taht can be a lttle hard to get through. I am currently reading the NASB, which I also like, and it does include the Apocrophya and is approved by the Catholic Church.\n\nHope this helps and that you will continue to read your bible and grow in Christ.
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Hebrew and Aramaic.\nThe two share the same alphabet.\nAramaic was the spoken language, and Hebrew was the language of scholarship and learning.
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Actually, you come very close!  I suggest an excellent book, "Idioms of the Bible", the author's name is beyond me for now.  It was created by  a Bible scholar who is very familiar with both modern and ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and has done some wonderful research in various areas relating to the Bible and religion.