A Tentative Reconstruction of the Jewish Aramaic of Matthew 3:7-10--S3--
Along with Some Analysis of John-Baptizer's Movement vis a vis the Jesus Movement
As Speech Communities Potentially Independent of Complete Dominance
By the Larger Koine Greek Speaking Culture.


First, a few practical details. I shall now resort to 'splitting' my commentary on Q in parallel, back-to-back entries, going for the Q in Matthew first, then analyzing the Q of Luke, as that is the format of Q Parallels... which if the avid reader of this web-log knows by following here is the reference-work, the 'Bible,' we shall use to simplify all matters of sorting out my approach to the material at-hand. Generally speaking, there is some discrepancy between the text of Q in Matthew and the parallel text in Luke [although that is nearly "zero" for S2 here--- the texts are largely cognate except for Luke 3:10-14, which Kloppnborg and others consider to be questionably in Q.] To deal with all the ins-and-outs of differences between one text and another in Matthew and Luke in fine is hair-splitting and pedantry... and not a few folks would argue that what I am doing in this immense project is a little pedantice to begin with! So I must be both effective and efficient in my expenditure of energies.

But before I go much further, I must make an utterance that may tend to explain whatever abbreviated quality the reader may find in this entry, this time on S2 Matthew 3:3-10 [and next time for Luke 3:7-9 and 3:1-14, also from S2 ]: I laborously toiled all through this New Year's Eve Day on this entry already, only to 'lose' almost every line of copy to a 'glitch' that may have been my fault-- may have been my PCs fault-- may have been my server's part-- may have been the fault of Blogger.com-- but at any rate a day of blog-entry is gone gone gone. I am only fractionally as ready to tackle this web-log entry-- which is really long-overdue after much hard research.

Let us turn to Matthew 3:7-10 itself, the first half-it of this S2 Q entry. The gist of the pericope is that John-Baptizer is telling-off the religious power-elite, saying that unless they repent for their evil-doing, they will lose their status as 'Chosen People,' which God could-- as He desired-- bring up common stones to be the 'Chosen People." Now some scholars have argued that John was an Qumran-style 'Essene,' but the Qumran sectarians in the "War Scroll" 1QM, portray spiritual and perhaps actual eschatological war with the Kittim [i.e. the Romans, Greeks, and other Gentiles] not in keeping with his passage here where John is passing 'chosen-ness' to those who are righteous, rather than to those who have a certain pedigree through Abraham. It is clear that John-Baptist would have in this sense been considered a peculiar or heretical Essene; but that is not to say he was not an Essene. The very fact that the Essenes "dwelt in many cities," as Philo writes [Hypothetica 11:1] is reason to think that-- like all social organizations they were subject to organizational evolution with changing ideologies. Thus I agree with those who find the Therapeutae of whom Philo writes in "On the Contemplative Live," passim, to be healers with a theology cognate with Qumran and perhaps the Baptist Movement...yea perhaps too the Jesus Movement. I am inclined to agree with Anton Dupont-Sommer, in The Essene Writings from Qumran, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1961, that "Christianity is an Essenism that has largely succeded."

I am fatigued from having written all this previously, only to have it lost in cyberspace...But let me begin again now to go over the key words in these verses, first mentioning the English word Kloppenborg uses in his translation [or the simpler Today's English Version uses when Kloppenborg's usage does not 'bring up' anything in the "Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon," http://cal1.cn.huc.edu], a contingency that happens often enough to have this option as a "decision rule" in my scholarship-algorithm. After identifying the English-usage-in-translation, I shall identify the [Koine] Greek word in Roman-letter transliteration, then go to findings from CAL to ferret out Jewish-Aramaic words [either words appearing in Jastrow or in Sokoloff] to ascertain the prime use for each semantic domain [conceived pragmatically.] I find it quite remarkable that with Jewish Aramaic there tends to be only one, or at most only very few words that reduce for selection as viable in almost any assay for determining which word is best in a semantic context at-hand.

Here begins the analysis of these semantic domains in Matthew S2:

MATTHEW 3:7

• "Brood," Greek: gennEmata, noun, neuter, vocative, plural; CAL= no viable word for "brood" as noun exists in Jewish Aramaic; "nest" is found to witness q^n, cf. Jastrow p. 1387, 1. "nest, swarm"; 2. "close space"; but note that Old Syriac Gospels Syriacus and Curiatonus plus Peshitta as well show y^l^d^), "offspring," which corresponds to Jewish Aramaic y^l^d, cf. Jastrow p. 578, "child," Sokoloff, "to give birth," af'el "to be born"; in the absence of a viable usage from CAL, the usage in the Syriac witness prompts me to prefer y^l^d as best choice here; this is also consistent with the general translation of gennEmata as "produce, offspring."
• "Viper[s]/Snake[s]," Greek: echidnOn, noun, feminine, plural, genitive; CAL= there is one word which is dubiously standing for "viper," )^p^(, cf. Jastrow p. 106, "viper, adder"; but CAL indicates this same word may stand for "hyena"; for "snake" there is a universal Aramaicism x^y^w^y, cf. Jastrow 452, also see Sokoloff, "serpent"; also (^k^n, cf. Jastrow, p. 1079, "coiled snake," Sokoloff roots in echinos, ibid. the Greek word in Q here; (^k^n seems to be a word with long, rooted etymology, even though Greek-in-origin; it is rather difficult to detemine whether John-Baptizer-- who is even less-likely to have spoken Greek than Jesus-- used this (^k^n or the other word )^p^( ; neither choice of words would detract substantially from the general meaning, given the Jewish ideas about the 'uncleanness' serpents of all types.
• "Warn[ed]," Greek: hypedeiksen, verb, indicative, active, aorist, singular, 3 person singular; CAL= the CAL print-out is 5 pages long, having but one really germane Jewish Aramaic word of viability: t^r^y, cf. Jastrow p. 1698, relates to a Hebrew cognate, all meaning "to forewarn," especially "to inform a person about to commit a crime of a penalty he will incur."
• "Flee," Greek: phugein, verb, infinitive, active, 2 aorist; CAL= of the 4 pages printed, the best choice available was (^r^q, cf. Jastrow p.1123, Sokoloff, also at pertinent cit., "to flee, run"; pa'el,"to put to chase."
• "Wrath," Greek: orgEs, noun, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= few words appear in the CAL print-out for this semantic-domain; the most-viable usage is r^g^w^z, cf. Jastrow p. 1447, Sokoloff p. 515, "anger, wrath" ; Sokoloff relates this to a root-verb r^g^z, "to be angry."
• "[To] Come," Greek: mellousEs, verb, participle, active, present, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= the print-out from CAL for this word was--predictably-- huge at 19 pages, but only two words seem to have any resonance on the topic at hand; first we may consider )^t^y, cf. Jastrow p. 132, relates to Hebrew )^t^h, both meaning "to come, to arrive, to occur-to"; also "a formula of assurance"; also "surely, indeed"; but this word more-nearly refers to a PHYSICAL coming than to a temporal coming; we are led to look at the general word in Aramaic for "to be," h^w^y, for an expression that can be taken to mean-- quite commonly-- a CHRONOLOGICAL coming; cf. Jastrow p. 338 and all the Aramaic dictionaries; this latter word h^w^y seems to be by far the best choice given the context of this pericope in Q.

MATTHEW 3:8

• "Bear," Greek: poiEsate, verb, imperative, active, aorist, 2 person plural; CAL= the print-out from CAL is 6 pages in length; it has one good Jewish Aramaic entry, y^l^d, identical to the root of the word for "brood," we chose above in Matthew 3:7, yet cf. again Jastrow p. 578, verb-form, "to bear, to beget"; af'el "to beget, produce"; pal'el "to act as midwife"; ithpa'el "to be born, to grow, to come forth."
• "Fruit[s]," Greek: karpon, noun, masculine, singular, accusative; CAL= the print-out is 7 pages long this time, mostly listing different kinds of fruits, with a concentration of listings in Syriac; there is one listing for a generalized word for "fruit," )^b, cf. Jastrow p. 2, "swelling, spreading, the shoots of a tree"; "state of growth, development"; but CAL-- whose philology is more-recent and said to be superior to Jastrow's-- indicates that )^b also means fruit-in-general.
• "Repent[ance]," Greek: metanoias, noun, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= the number of words for "repent[ance] in Aramaic is tiny; I have just about 3/4 of a page print-out for the comprehensive reading from all dialects known; the Jewish Aramaic word that looms out as succinctly viable is t^y^w^b, cf. Jastrow p. 1663, Sokoloff p. 580, with meanings: 1. "to vomit"; 2. "to return [especially to return to God, 'repent']"; 3. "to answer, reply"; 4. sometimes in the plural, "to go-to-and-fro, waywardness"; the sense of "to vomit" is not an accidental meaning to t^y^w^b, as far as I can tell from cross -comparison with other Aramaic dictionaries [Syriac, etc.]; it seems patent that the general sense of this word-- which almost certainly is the expression Joh-Baptizer used-- is closer to the modern notions of existential-nausea/angst/dread than to the comparatively healthy complete-transformation-of-the-mind implied by metanoia [ Greek: meta-- "beyond"---nous--"{this} mind.]

MATTHEW 3:9

• "Say," Greek: legein, verb, infinitive, active, present; CAL= the list here is only two pages long, and passim in Aramaic -- and in many Semitic languages-- the primary word for for "say" is )^m^r, cf. Jastrow p. 79, Sokoloff p.63, with meanings "they say, it is said; to praise, proclaim; to say, state, recite."
• "Have," Greek: echomen, verb, indicative, active, present, 1st person plural; CAL= the print-out from CAL is 15 pages long, and has many irrelevant entries, and Syriac witness is much-in-evidence; one universal Aramaicism of all these words-- which does not exactly mean "to have" but rather "to acquire"-- is q^n^y, cf. Jastrow pp. 1391-1392, Sokoloff p. 497, with meanings: "to create; to acquire; to own; to take possession"; Sokoloff mentions noun-form q^n^y^y^n, "ownership"; it may be that all these Aramaicisms come to bear on this point.
• "Father," Greek: patera, noun, masculine, singular, accusative; CAL= only one Aramaic word really means "father," and that is )^b, or-- more vocatively-- )^b^), cf. Jastrow p. 1-2, Sokoloff pp. 31-32, with meanings "father, ancestor, progenitor, teacher, chief, leader, author, originator, forefather."
• "Stone[s]," Greek: lithOn, noun, masculine, genitive plural; CAL= the CAL-generated list is 8 pages long, this time with several possible usages; we find-- at the least-level-of-probable-usage, r^g^m, which refers both to the "stones used in stoning-people," and "stoning-as-a-form-of-execution"; next in likelihood comes )^b^n, which denotes stone of all types, including construction-stone, cast-off stone, pebbles, marble, measuring-stone, and black-marble; since John-Baptizer was unlikely to imply that the people he was railing against in this passage were 'gems' or even people of moral value, we can pass over this word; so we come to g^l^l, the likeliest word, because it means "rubble, cobble, lump, untrimmed stone" yet also "wave, consequence"; cf. Jastrow p. 250; this last word-- the word for cobblestones and 'rubble'-- seems to be the best choice by far for the context into which we much fit its semantic domain.
• "[To] Raise-Up Children," Greek: word 1. egeirai, verb, infinitive,active, aorist; CAL= of the 8 pages in the CAL print-out, we are really to find one good entry for "to raise children," and fortunately it is a universal Aramaicism; this word is r^b^y, cf. Jastrow,p. 1441, relates to Hebrew cognate, both meaning "to be much, to be many, to grow, to increase" with pa'el "to rear, raise, produce"; "to raise to dignity, elevate, anoint"; "to lend or borrow on usury"; af'el "to increase, add."

MATTHEW 3:10

• "Axe," Greek: aksinE, noun, feminine, nominative singular; CAL= there are several axe-like tools listed in the two-page print-out from CAL for "axe," including two for adze-like appliances, x^c^y^n^) and n^g^r; whereas the primary word for axe in Jewish Aramaic--as used in the Targums-- is n^r^g^); therefore I shall choose this word as most-appropriate in the semantic context.
• "Root," Greek: rizan, noun, feminine, accusative singular; CAL= the CAL list is three pages long, with the sole best choice for a Jewish Aramaic word appearing to be (^y^q^r, cf. Jastrow p. 1075, with meanings "root, essence, reality, main-object, principles-of-faith"; also "orignally, at first"; also "a castrated animal"; from this broad-spectrum of semantics it is quite apparent that IF John-Baptizer were speaking in Aramaic at this usage, he would be implying much, much more than indicated simply in the Greek text, or for that matter in the English, no matter whether the text is 'metaphorically' interpreted given the usual spectrum of association in our language.
• "Tree," Greek: dendrOn, noun, neuter, genitive plural; CAL= the 'print' from CAL is 5 pages long, but most of the entries are for kinds of trees or parts of trees; only one nearly-universal Aramaicism stands out-- and is a Jewish Aramaic word-- for "tree," namely, )^y^l^n, cf. Jastrow pp. 49-50, Sokoloff p. 50; Jastrow relates this word to a Hebrew cognate for "oak," but it is quite apparent that generally in Aramaic it is the non-specific word for "tree."
• "Cut," Greek: ekkoptetai, verb, indicative, passive, present, 3rd person singular; CAL= the print-out from CAL is-- not surprisingly by most standards--- a 'biggie,' totalling 13 pages in all; it illustrates several words for "to cut" with varying degrees of viability for the linguistic context; least likely are g^z^r, whose central meaning is "to cut around, circumcise"; next in likelihood we find x^r^c, which basically means "to cut-into"; more-likely-germane for our context is q^c^c, cf. Jastrow p. 1404, Sokoloff p. 501, with the basic sense "to cut off, cut down, stipulate [a fee], mutilate"; to my thinking, however, the most-plausible Jewish Aramaic word for this context is found on page one of the print-out, i.e. g^d^d, cf. Jastrow p. 210, with Hebrew cognate ditto, meaning both "to cut, to cut off"; q^c^c simply has too many side-associations that detract from the simple sense of "to cut-off," which is implied exactly in the Koine Greek... not a sure-fire indicator of what lies at the bottom of Q but-- unfortunately-- the only indicator we have at our disposal!
• "Fire," Greek: pyr, noun, neuter, accusative singular; CAL= there appears to be just one Jewish Aramaic word for "fire"; the CAL list of 6 pages does mention one word as an alternative, but on closer inspection it turns out to mean "fireplace"; this word for fire in Jewish Aramaic is d^l^y^q^h, cf. Jastrow, p. 310, "fire, conflagration."

REFLECTIONS ON THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF "THE BAPTISTS" IN COMPARISON WITH THE "JESUS MOVEMENT" AND THE PREVAILING CULTURE IN 1ST-CENTURY PALESTINE GIVEN THE ABOVE:

I am not privileged to understand the inner workings of the scholarship which led to the inclusion of S3 [and the other Kloppenborg entries about John-Baptizer] into Q; I feel certain given Kloppenborg's profuse annotation that he acts in concert with a great 'choir' of authorities on the subject of Q, the study of which goes back now more than a century-and-three-quarters. I know therefore that to link the utterances-in-text of John-Baptizer with the logia of Jesus of Nazareth invites some social interpretation that goes well-beyond the mere text of Q, whether or not Jesus or the Baptist spoke Aramaic/Hebrew as a first language, but many predictable social forces at the time would synergize with this occurence between the 'we' of the 'Little Flock' and the "they' of the Ethnoi, "the Nations, the Gentiles," who were not the first target-audience of Jesus' ministry. This point cannot be pushed too far, for obiously Jesus and the Baptist could understand the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, but railed against them as opressors.

But we sometimes must come to some uncomfortable thinking about Jesus, and no doubt John-Baptizer the more: if they were opposed to such people as the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, largely these indigent preachers were opposing people who could read and write! This to the Sadducee was implied by close adherence to the Torah, for the Pharisee by codifying the corpus of Tannaitic laws that were the Halakah, which ultimately made up the great work or Rabbinical scholarship known as the Mishnah. And-- in fine-- when Jesus castigates "the scribes" [Greek: grammateus; Aramaic: s^p^r], he is excoriating the only people in the village society in which he lived who could read the Scripture and interpret it, thus serving for all notary-public and copying purposes. It seems inexorable not to conclude that what Jesus criticizes about the religious power-elite is its very literacy, or at least he speaks with a kind of envy that comes from those who are powerless to be literate.

Contextual reading of the Babatha Archives, cf. The Documents from the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters, Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, Israel, 1989, reveals much by way of the sociology-of-language for the proposition I just presented in the paragraph above. It is quite clear, from the letters found in the 'Cave of Letters,' that even rather well-to-do people in Palestinian society during the Tannaitic period: 1. used vernacular Aramaic as their first language; 2. depended on 'scribes' to pen important documents into either Aramaic-- which was the language of the synagogue and people-- or Greek which was the language of commerce and most of the Empire-- or sometimes Latin-- which was in Palestine occasionally the language of the rulers. If Jesus ever had a problem with the "Scribes" as witnessed doing the work in the Babatha Archives, one would almost have to call into question whether Jesus had a "beef" with writing-itself; for here from the Cave of Letters we witness occasional evidence of usuary by a public official, but the "scribe" who records the deed of the transaction just seems for the most part to be the town 'intellectual,' the one who can pen down in Hebrew script the business at hand, and especially to be valued if he can translate Aramaic into Greek, and vice-versa.

For some, it may not be pleasant to recognize this anti-intellectual trend in the Jesus Movement, which in turn may have been unfortunate baggage from the 'Baptist' Movement-- we simply do not know and on this point must resort to 'guessology.' But it is clear that the stress on belief-alone as the basis of real salvation, "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impssibe unto you" Matthew 17:20...amounts to a tall challenge to rational thinking, and throughout its big, long history Christianity has had its solo fides devotees, who at the bottom do not seem so much to be believers as blind-bunglgers. I do not think I would trust such a grain-of-mustardseed person, ultimately, any more than I would trust a baby in the crib to do my bookkeeping.

Fortunately, most functioning Christians seem to find ways around the impasse of anti-smarts that is impled in solo fides living in the concrete, i.e. without any way to sublimate it or abstract it into living that can get you as far as a balanced diet, constructing superhighways, managing an entrepreneurship, rationally deciding for whom one should vote in an election, learning a foreign language, designing a piece of elctronic equipment, or making rational choices about one's demise and mortality. Much of the best in religion today simply has a way of critiquing what is irrational as "bad" and striving to do "better," i.e. "more reasonably." When Christians cease to do this they tend to cease to function, and the Word which is God is silenced.

I