The
Lord's Prayer in Aramaic
The Aramaic Language
Aramaic is a language belonging to the
West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic
subfamily of the Afro Asiatic family of
languages.
After the Jews were defeated by the
Babylonians in 586 B.C., they began to
speak Aramaic instead of Hebrew.
They retained Hebrew as the sacred language
of their religion.
Although Aramaic was displaced officially
by Greek after the coming of Alexander the
Great, it held its own under Greek domination
and subsequent Roman rule.
Aramaic was the language of Jesus.
Following the rise of Islam in the 7th century AD,
however, Aramaic began to yield to Arabic,
by which eventually it was virtually replaced.