The Galilean dialect was the form of

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Jewish Western Aramaic was a Western Aramaic language spoken by the Jews during the Classic Era in Judea and the Levant, specifically in Hasmonean, Herodian and Roman Judea and adjacent lands in the late first m ...

spoken by people in Galilee during the late Second Temple period, for example at the time of Jesus and the disciples, as distinct from a Judean dialect spoken in

Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...

. The

Aramaic of Jesus There exists a consensus among scholars that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic. This is generally agreed upon by historians. Aramaic was the common language of Judea in the first century AD. The villages of Nazareth and Caper ...

, as recorded in the Gospels, gives various examples of Aramaic phrases. The New Testament notes that the pronunciation of Peter gave him away as a Galilean to the servant girl at the brazier the night of Jesus' trial (see Matthew 26:73 and Mark 14:70).

Scholarly reconstruction

Classical scholarship

In the 17th and 18th centuries, John Lightfoot and Johann Christian Schöttgen identified and commented on the Galilean Aramaic speech. Schöttgen's work ''Horae Ebraicae et Talmudicae'', which studied the New Testament in the context of the

Talmud The Talmud (; he, , Talmūḏ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law ('' halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the ce ...

, followed that of Lightfoot. Both scholars provided examples of differences between Galilean and Judean speech. The 19th century grammarian

Gustaf Dalman Gustaf Hermann Dalman (9 June 1855 – 19 August 1941) was a German Lutheran theologian and orientalist. He did extensive field work in Palestine before the First World War, collecting inscriptions, poetry, and proverbs. He also collected physic ...

identified "Galilean Aramaic” in the grammar of the Palestinian Talmud and Midrash, but he was doubted by

Theodor Zahn Theodor Zahn or Theodor von Zahn (10 October 1838 in Moers – 5 March 1933 in Erlangen) was a German Protestant theologian, a biblical scholar. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. Career Zahn was born in Moers of the ...

, who raised issues with using the grammar of writings from the 4th–7th centuries to reconstruct the Galilean Aramaic of the 1st century.

Modern scholarship

Porter (2000) notes that scholars have tended to be "vague" in describing exactly what a "Galilean dialect" entailed. Hoehner (1983) notes that the

has one place (bEr 53b) with several amusing stories about Galilean dialect that indicate only a defective pronunciation of gutturals in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Hugo Odeberg attempted a grammar based on the Aramaic of the

Genesis Rabbah Genesis Rabbah (Hebrew: , ''B'reshith Rabba'') is a religious text from Judaism's classical period, probably written between 300 and 500 CE with some later additions. It is a midrash comprising a collection of ancient rabbinical homiletical inter ...

in 1939. Michael Sokoloff's English preface to Caspar Levias's 1986 ''A Grammar of Galilean Aramaic'' (in Hebrew) also sheds light on the controversy that began with Dalman. E. Y. Kutscher's 1976 ''Studies in Galilean Aramaic'' may offer some newer insights. More recently, attempts at better understanding the Galilean dialect in the New Testament have been taken up by Steve Caruso, who has spent over 10 years compiling a topical lexical reference of the Galilean dialect. Caruso has noted the difficulties of the task:

Personal names

Evidence on possible shortening or changing of Hebrew names into Galilean is limited. Ossuary inscriptions invariably show full Hebrew name forms.

David Flusser David Flusser (Hebrew: דוד פלוסר; born 1917; died 2000) was an Israeli professor of Early Christianity and Judaism of the Second Temple Period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography David Flusser was born in Vienna on Septem ...

suggested that the short name

Yeshu Yeshu (Hebrew: ''Yēšū'') is the name of an individual or individuals mentioned in rabbinic literature, which historically has been assumed to be a reference to Jesus when used in the Talmud. The name ''Yeshu'' is also used in other sources ...

for

Jesus in the Talmud There are several passages in the Talmud which are believed by some scholars to be references to Jesus. The name used in the Talmud is " Yeshu", the Aramaic vocalization (although not spelling) of the Hebrew name ''Yeshua''. The identification ...

was 'almost certainly' a dialect form of Yeshua, based on the swallowing of the

ayin ''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represen ...

noted by Paul Billerbeck, but most scholars follow the traditional understanding of the name as a polemical reduction.George Howard 2005 ''Hebrew Gospel of Matthew'' p. 207 "According to the Tol'doth Yeshu, Jesus' original name was Yehoshua (otvp). Later, when he became a heretic, his name was… for the name of Jesus became common in medieval Jewish polemics and can be found even in the Talmud (cf. b)."

References

{{reflist Jews and Judaism in the Roman Empire Hasmonean Kingdom Galilee Judeo-Aramaic languages