Articles
The Languages of the Bible
God’s decision to provide us with a collection of books in the Bible that would adequately reveal His mind and the scheme of redemption was incredibly generous. The cooperation between each member of the Godhead in this process (1 Corinthians 2:9-13; Hebrews 1:1; 2 Peter 1:16-21) boggles the imagination. Add to this that God used fallible men to pen his infallible, inspired Scriptures and one cannot help but fall before Him in awe and grandeur!
All of this begs the question - how did God use mortal tongues to convey unfathomable realities? Not just from the standpoint of verbal and plenary inspiration, as we have already discussed, but from the standpoint of language itself? Language is ever changing and has inherent faults: too broad (or too narrow) semantic range, miscommunications based on limited context, cultural idioms, etc. When God chose to use human language to open His mind up to people, was there a particular language He could use that would circumvent these issues? Was there a “holy” and “pure” language that would work best? These are all worthwhile questions and they deserve answers. So, let’s address them by looking at the languages of the Bible. This will also briefly introduce the Bible’s translation across languages, a topic forthcoming in our articles.
God chose only a few languages to write the autographs (i.e., original copies) of the Bible. Though He could have chosen from at least several dozen broad language families arising from the divinely-introduced phenomenon at Babel, and even from there choose one of hundreds or thousands of dialects, He chose just three: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Yes, just three! Even then, Aramaic is used so infrequently, that it is more accurate to speak of the two languages of the Bible. Aramaic is restricted to Daniel 2-7, Ezra 4-7, and a few other select phrases and scattered individual words. Aramaic is often introduced either explicitly or implicitly as a quotation from pagan royal archives or as a precise quote from the native tongue of the speaker, both for some contextual purpose. You might call to mind that the Gospels will also occasionally use the exact Aramaic speech of our Lord during key events in their narratives. When Jesus resurrects Jairus’ daughter, He said, Talitha cum, which is translated, “Little girl, arise.” His famous, Eloi, eloi lama sabbacthani (i.e., “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) is also recorded in Aramaic. But these are exceptions and not the rule.
The Old Testament is recorded predominantly in Hebrew. While some have argued that this is the oldest, and in some way holiest of languages, this remains an unconfirmable and faulted hypothesis. From the standpoint of the linguist, biblical Hebrew is definitely not free from faults. It has a painfully narrow vocabulary that regularly befuddles translators. You can witness this by the amount of footnotes in your Old Testaments offering other possible, and very different, translations. This was simply the language spoken by Abraham and his descendants and it was therefore suitable for God’s oracles to this particular people (Romans 3:2). This was generally the case anyways; there were times when the Jews did not even know their own language well enough to understand those oracles (e.g., Nehemiah 8). At this point, and beyond, Aramaic became the predominant dialect of the Hebrews, at least partly explaining the uptick in Aramaic witnessed during the captivity and post-captivity period.
What about the New Testament? These 27 books were composed in Greek. Some have suggested that a few of these books were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic as well, but the information at hand indicates overwhelmingly that the common language of the day, Greek, was used. We should note as well that the Greek used for the New Testament is different from Classical and Modern Greek. Rather, the writers used Koine, or common, Greek which was the lingua franca from a few centuries BC to a few centuries AD. Like Hebrew for the Old Testament, Greek was the language of the original recipients, yet now it also transcended cultural barriers spreading the gospel to the remotest regions of the world.
There were no perfect languages that God could use to convey His Word. He had to choose imperfect ones. God used the language of the original recipients to reach out to His creation. He knew that this was the best way and He knew that it would be translated across languages to make it available to all people. God’s approval of this process, when done conscientiously, is vouchsafed by the New Testament writers quoting from a translation, the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint (LXX). If God’s Word is inspired, if it is guided by the Holy Spirit, and if these men could effectively quote from a translation, then we can have confidence of God’s approval as it is done today. Despite the limitations of every language, the Scriptures can be effectively and reliably translated. The original composition of the Scriptures utilized imperfect language; our modern literal versions can do the same.
