The Galilean dialect was the form of Jewish Aramaic spoken by people in

Galilee Galilee (; ; ; ) is a region located in northern Israel and southern Lebanon consisting of two parts: the Upper Galilee (, ; , ) and the Lower Galilee (, ; , ). ''Galilee'' encompasses the area north of the Mount Carmel-Mount Gilboa ridge and ...

during the late

Second Temple period The Second Temple period or post-exilic period in Jewish history denotes the approximately 600 years (516 BCE – 70 CE) during which the Second Temple stood in the city of Jerusalem. It began with the return to Zion and subsequent reconstructio ...

, for example at the time of Jesus and the disciples, as distinct from a Judean dialect spoken in

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

. The

Aramaic of Jesus There exists a consensus among scholars that Jesus of Nazareth spoke the Aramaic language. Aramaic was the common language of Roman Judaea, and was thus also spoken by Jesus' disciples. The villages of Nazareth and Capernaum in Galilee, whe ...

, 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 A brazier () is a container used to burn charcoal or other solid fuel for cooking, heating or rituals. It often takes the form of a metal box or bowl with feet, but in some places it is made of terracotta. Its elevation helps circulate air, feed ...

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 (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of Haskalah#Effects, modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the cen ...

, followed that of Lightfoot. Both scholars provided examples of differences between Galilean and Judean speech. The 19th century grammarian Gustaf Dalman 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 (, also known as Bereshit Rabbah and abbreviated as GenR) is a religious text from Judaism's classical period, probably written between 300 and 500 CE with some later additions. It is an expository midrash comprising a collection of ...

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: Caruso has since published a nearly complete grammar in English.

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 suggested that the short name Yeshu for Jesus in the Talmud was 'almost certainly' a dialect form of

Yeshua Yeshua () was a common alternative form of the name Yehoshua () in later books of the Hebrew Bible and among Jewish people of the Second Temple period. The name corresponds to the Greek spelling (), from which, through the Latin /, comes the En ...

, based on the swallowing of the

ayin ''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is si ...

noted by Paul Billerbeck; other 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 History of Galilee Judeo-Aramaic languages