[B-Greek] John 19:13,17 GABBAQA and GOLGAQA

Trevor Peterson 06PETERSON at cua.edu
Thu Apr 17 08:25:31 EDT 2003


>===== Original Message From Jason Hare <jhronline at yahoo.com> =====
>Glen,
>
>Basically, the NIV says "Aramaic" because these words
>follow Aramaic structure. They are not Hebrew. ;-)
>
>To put it simply, Aramaic uses a final ALEF to
>represent the article ("the") while Hebrew uses an
>initial HEH. The A (alpha) at the termination of both
>GABBAQA and GOLGAQA represent the Aramaic article,
>which demonstrates that the words are Aramaic rather
>than Hebrew.

A couple other points (that I don't think are all that far off-topic for 
reasons that should hopefully become clear). First, it's difficult in Greek to 
distinguish between the Aramaic masculine determined state (explained above) 
and the Aramaic or Hebrew feminine absolute state (typically written in BH 
with he rather than alef, but both forms are inconsistently represented, for 
instance, in Qumran orthography). The endings would be pronounced the same 
either way, and for a place name transcribed in Greek, I don't know that I'd 
stake my life on reading it one way or the other. Second, there's a fuzziness 
to identifying the language of a place name. I could tell you that the town my 
grandfather lives in is called Tonawanda in English, and that would be true as 
far as it goes. The origin of the name, however, is Native American, which has 
nothing to do with English. Similarly, I don't think it's a stretch to suppose 
that a Greek speaker writing in Greek could say a particular place (that may 
have another name in Greek) is called X in Hebrew, when X is really of Aramaic 
origin. It would still be true that Hebrew speakers call it X, regardless of 
the original language, and that they generally understand what X means, even 
if they're not altogether fluent in Aramaic.

The other issue that has to be addressed here is what the Greek term means. 
Everywhere in the NT that a Semitic language is specifically referenced, the 
term used is HEBRAIOS. (I think that's the spelling--I don't have the text in 
front of me at the moment.) Some contend that this term always means Hebrew 
and that another term (not used in the NT) was available to Greek speakers 
when they wanted to identify Aramaic as such. Others suppose that it's a 
general term that means Hebrew or Aramaic. Add to that the notion that Aramaic 
was the primary spoken language of Levantine Jews at the time, and you get the 
approach of some translations (like the NIV) to translate this word 
consistently as Aramaic. I don't want to argue the point here of what 
languages these people spoke. I'm just trying to outline the issues involved.

In short, it's not as simple as looking at the form represented in the Greek 
text and translating the label based on what language it looks like. We can't 
always tell for sure whether the form is Hebrew or Aramaic, even if we can, 
that doesn't necessarily rule out calling it Hebrew regardless (especially 
with proper nouns), and perhaps the more important question is what the word 
HEBRAIOS meant to a Greek-speaker at that time. (There's no clear reason IMO 
that we couldn't conclude that a word or phrase is in fact Aramaic and should 
have been called Aramaic by some set of standards but that the writer meant to 
tell us it was Hebrew.) I would say then that we have to look at the usage of 
this term and related terms from the period in question to ascertain what 
people meant by them.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics



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