Aramaic to Greek Transliterations in the Western Middle Aramaic[1] Andrew Messmer Andrew Messmer is the academic dean at Seminario Teológico de Sevilla in Santiponce, Spain; associate professor at the Facultad Internacional de Teología IBSTE in Castelldefels, Spain; and affiliated researcher at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Belgium. Introduction For those scholars and laymen interested in the Aramaic language around the time of Jesus, there are several interesting questions to pursue, some of which are: How was Aramaic pronounced during the time of Jesus? What tools do we have to clarify ambiguities in the Aramaic language? What was the state of Aramaic–Greek bilingualism in Judea and its surrounding environs? There are various tools that researchers use to answer these questions,[2] and one of them is studying transliterations from Aramaic into Greek from the corpus of texts known as Western Middle Aramaic (hereafter WMA). Generally speaking, this division of the Aramaic language spans the time period of 200 BC–AD 200 and covers the geographical region of Judea and its surrounding environs.[3] This article tabulates the instances of WMA transliterations into Greek across four corpora in order to determine the frequency and trends regarding which Greek characters were used to transliterate Aramaic ones…
