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In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #202, Death and Rebirth of Hebrew, Nehemia is joined again by Israeli journalist Elon Gilad to discuss the language spoken by Jesus in the 1st century and how a Mosaic of the sun god Helios came to adorn an ancient Galilean synagogue.

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Elon: And it’s just beautiful. And it’s this mosaic, and the text in the Hebrew… and it’s clearly no question it’s a synagogue. But in the center of the mosaic, which is the floor, the center of the synagogue, there’s a zodiac, the twelve signs of the zodiac. And in the middle, there is a portrait of God stylized as the sun god on a chariot the way they, at the time, would draw sun gods.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Elon Gilad. He’s a writer for Ha’aretz, one of the major newspapers in Israel, specializing in Hebrew and Jewish history. And he’s the author of a book called The Secret History of Judaism. His research focuses on the interface between Biblical and Modern Hebrew, with a particular interest in uncovering the origins of traditions and words. Elon shares his linguistic insights through popular TikTok videos on Hebrew etymology. He has a BA from Tel Aviv University and is currently working on a master’s there. Shalom, Elon.

Elon: Hello. This is a very important thing because this often comes up. I see in the comments in my videos a lot of anti-Israel people: “It’s a made-up language,” blah, blah. So, it’s a little hard to conceptualize, but what we mean when we say that the Hebrew died; it was a living language, and it stopped being a living language, and then it was revived. So, it’s worth discussing what we mean by what happened.

Nehemia: Okay, yeah.

Elon: It’s a complicated process, but it’s worth understanding.

Nehemia: So, explain, please.

Elon: First of all, in ancient times, obviously people were speaking Hebrew. The people who wrote the Bible, the people in the Bible, they were speaking a language. This language was very, very, very similar to the languages of their neighbors, the Edomites, et cetera. They could have spoken… I don’t know if they had, really, the idea that they were speaking different languages. You can think of it as a dialect or accent; it’s very similar. But all those other peoples, they died out a lot sooner, and Jews persevered and existed also into Hellenistic times and Roman times, and they continued speaking Hebrew. To what extent? Well, there was a gradual shift away from Hebrew and into Aramaic.

Aramaic is now an arcane language spoken by very few people. People will study the Talmud, which is mostly written in Aramaic, but at the time, Aramaic was like English. So, the Arameans, these were the people who lived in what is today Syria, these wandering people, and they died out pretty early in antiquity. But somehow the Persian Empire adopted their language as the international language of communication. And what happened was, this was the language to speak if you wanted to do anything. This was like English. If you wanted to be somebody, you had to learn to read and write in Aramaic, because that’s what communication and business was done in. Slowly, Aramaic took over and people were speaking Aramaic. There’s good evidence that Jesus, for example, didn’t speak Hebrew, he spoke Aramaic.

Nehemia: Do you want to go into what some of that evidence is? Or maybe we’ll come back to that.

Elon: Well, there are little tidbits, but the best thing is, as he dies… there’s a quote of what Jesus says when he died, just before he died. And he’s quoting from the Bible saying, “God, why have you forsaken me?” Now, we don’t have the original. We don’t have the recording, obviously, but the way that the Greek translation appears, the Greek translation seems to be translating the Aramaic.

Nehemia: Not just that, it quotes it in Aramaic, in Matthew…

Elon: That’s right, it quotes it in Aramaic. That’s right. Everything is in Greek, but that is in Aramaic. So, if Jesus was using Aramaic to speak to God and from the Bible, which is obviously in Hebrew, it’s a good indication that this would be the language he was using. If you’re going to assume that anything from the New Testament has any relation to history, I would think that that part, if anything, would be remembered, because I don’t think that would be something early Christians would invent.

Nehemia: There’s something called argument fr