Page 19 - Yahwehs Book

You will notice a city down toward the bottom of the map that is named Ur. The Bible declares Ur
to be the ancestral home of Abraham.

Genesis 11:27-28
Now these are the records of the generations of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor and
Haran; and Haran became the father of Lot. And Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in
the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans.

Because the Arameans were not the only family of people to dwell in this area, Aramaic was not the
exclusive language spoken. Another common language in Babylonia in the time of Abraham and his
forefathers was Akkadian. During a period of about a thousand years from the time of Abraham until
the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods (934 B.C. - 539 B.C.), a great influx of Arameans
came into this area. Consequently Aramaic became the common language of the land. It was during
the Neo-Babylonian period around 600 B.C., that Judah was led away into Babylonian captivity.
Daniel was carried into Babylon during this time, so it is not surprising that portions of the book of
Daniel were written in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew. The book of Ezra was also written during the
time of the Babylonian exile and the Jews return from Babylon. It too contains sections that were
written in Aramaic. Of approximately 23,000 verses in the Old Testament, roughly 250 of them are
written in Aramaic. The remainder are written in Hebrew.

If we follow the life of Abraham, we can readily identify the languages of the Old Testament.
Abraham was an Aramean who spoke Aramaic. Abraham was directed by Yahweh to leave the land
of his forefathers and travel to a far distant land. Over time, as Abraham’s descendants dwelt in the
land of Canaan where they were cut off from other speakers of Aramaic, their speech began to
change. The influence of the Canaanite languages had an impact on the language of the Hebrew
descendants of Abraham. As time passed the language spoken by the Hebrew people in Canaan
became so distinct that Aramaic and Hebrew were considered separate languages.

We see evidence of the profound changes that occurred in the Hebrew’s speech in an account found
in the book of II Kings. About 1300 years after Abraham’s descendants had been dwelling in
Canaan, King Sennacherib of Assyria laid siege to Jerusalem in the days of King Hezekiah.
Sennacherib’s commander, the Rabshakeh, came out to speak to the Jews, taunting them. The
Rabshakeh spoke openly in Hebrew, taunting the people of Jerusalem. One of Hezekiah’s ministers
urged the Rabshakeh to speak to Hezekiah’s servants in Aramaic, for the common people of Judea
no longer understood the language.

II Kings 18:26
Then Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, "Please speak to your
servants in Aramaic, for we understand it; and do not speak to us in Hebrew in the hearing of the
people who are on the wall."

The speech of Abraham’s descendants was still considered an Aramaic language in Hezekiah’s day,
but we see that it had become so differentiated from the Aramaic of the land of Assyria and Babylon
that most of the Hebrews could no longer understand Aramaic. A century after this, the Jews were
taken captive into the land of Babylon. There they were once more subjected to the Aramaic