Syrian Tries to Resurrect Language Spoken by Jesus

On these holy days leading to Easter, retired teacher George Rizkalla is on a lonely mission: to keep alive a language once spoken by Jesus.

A self-described “enthusiast” for his native Aramaic, he has written songs in it for public performances and drawn up glossaries of the language using both Latin and Arabic letters.

He prods his neighbors in this mountain village to speak it whenever possible and to teach it to the children so they won’t be swallowed up in the Arabic all around.

Still, Rizkalla hears the tongue of his forebears less and less as he walks the steep lanes of this mile-high community. He estimates that there are just 6,000 people, in Malula and two nearby villages, who still speak his branch of the Aramaic tongue.

“Even my own children do not understand everything,” he admits.

Aramaic--especially the western form spoken here in southern Syria, on the edges of the Holy Land--is hanging on by a thread in the modern world.

Some linguists fear that it may vanish in a generation or two unless steps are taken to preserve it. A handful of scholars is putting the language to paper and interviewing old people for arcane vocabulary. But most are sure that the living remnants of the tongue spoken throughout the Near East at the beginning of the Christian era is doomed.

“It may not be clay or marble, but it is a part of our heritage,” Rizkalla says. “We should not let it die.”

Experts marvel that Aramaic persists at all in the three isolated communities nestled in Syria’s Kalamoun mountains, 35 miles north of the capital, Damascus. They represent tiny islands in a ocean of Arabic.

One professor said it was like discovering someone who could speak ancient Egyptian alive today a few miles outside of Cairo.

Aramaic is one of the world’s late, great languages. It belongs to the Afroasiatic, or Hamito-Semitic, family, and is a cousin to Hebrew and more distantly Arabic. Its name comes from Aram, an archaic word for Syria.

The language spread from Syria to much of the ancient world--from Pakistan to upper Egypt--in the first millennium BC. Used by the Persian and Babylonian empires, especially from 700-200 BC, it became a transnational language of literature, politics and commerce, much as English is today.

What makes it of particular note to religious scholars is that Jews adopted Aramaic after being conquered by Babylon in the 6th century BC. The Books of Daniel and Ezra in the Bible were written in Aramaic, as was a major portion of the Talmud, the compilation of Jewish laws and traditions.

But is the language in Malula truly the language of Jesus? The evidence is circumstantial: Jesus, a Jewish resident of Galilee, less than 100 miles away, surely spoke the Aramaic of his day, and Malula is the nearest Aramaic-speaking community to survive.

Other strongly differentiated dialects--also called modern Aramaic but by now no longer understandable to people in Malula--exist in parts of Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

Despite Malula’s proximity to the land of Jesus, scholars hesitate to assert a direct descent because they lack evidence, and they caution that languages evolve so much that the talk of Malula would be incomprehensible to someone from Jesus’ era.

“If Jesus were to come back, he would not understand a word,” says Alan S. Kaye, professor of linguistics at the California State University at Fullerton, a specialist in Near Eastern and Arabic languages.

But for Malula’s overwhelmingly Christian population, a mix of Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics, the connection is an article of faith.

“When our master Jesus Christ first spoke, he spoke this language,” Serki Daboul, a 72-year-old patriarch dressed in a head scarf, embroidered jacket and traditional baggy trousers, said firmly. “As long as we live, this language will too.”

Malula residents, however, use only verbal Aramaic--they read and write in Arabic. Even church services are held in Greek and Arabic, although Rizkalla has put some hymns into Aramaic, as well as the Lord’s Prayer: “Obah h’teh bichmo--Our father who art in Heaven--Niyeetch katahz esh mak--Hallowed be thy name . . . “ he intones solemnly.

As for the rest of Syria and Palestine, Aramaic was swept aside when Islam burst upon the region in the 7th century. The Muslim conquerors brought in Arabic, the language of Muhammad and the Koran.

Malula’s location, on a steep slope pocked with caves, made it an ideal sanctuary for Christians who wanted neither the Arabic language nor the Muslim religion, and it managed to stay aloof for 1,300 years.

“This area has few economic resources. So when invading armies came through, they usually just walked right by,” says Timothy Heckenlively, a 26-year-old graduate student at UC Santa Barbara who is spending a year in Malula studying the language.

But that isolation is vanishing. Many residents now commute by a new highway to Damascus, finding work in the city’s bakeries.

“The language is dying, unfortunately,” Kaye says. “It can only be a matter of time, unless the governments of the area and or the United Nations and world community decides to keep it alive.”

Rizkalla, 59, describes the erosion: “Fifty years ago, all the students in Malula spoke Aramaic, and some of them could speak Arabic with difficulty. Now all speak Arabic, and some struggle with the Aramaic.”

He cites his grown children in Damascus.

“There they cannot see goats, or trees or peasants working in the field,” he says. “So all the words for these things are forgotten because they hear such words maybe once a year. In this way, the language gets poorer and poorer.”

Arnold Werner, a professor at the Center for Oriental Studies at the University of Erlangen in Germany, is keeping it alive for scholars around the world.

In two years, he expects to publish the first dictionary of the modern Malula language. He has already published a primer and a grammar, and each year he teaches it to half a dozen German graduate students.

Unlike other experts, he believes that Malula’s Aramaic will survive.

Although there are but 6,000 speakers now, that is probably higher than a century ago, he says.

People in Malula “are very proud to speak this language. . . . It is a very vivid language. They can talk in the public bath, say whatever they want, and no one can understand,” he says, chuckling.

Alluding to Werner’s students, Rizkalla predicts that “some day we may have to travel to Germany to hear our own language.”