ARAMA, HEIR, also called, by way of dis tinction, min, the Rabbi Mcieri, son of the celebrated Isaac Amnia, was born in Saragossa, accompanied his father to Naples in 1492, after the general expulsion of the _Jews from Spain, and after the death of his father (1494) emigrated to Salonica, where he died in 1556. He wrote valuable anno tations on Isaiah, yerentiah, yob, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Esther, which are distinguished for their brevity and for logically evolving the sense of the inspired writers. His style is very laconic, and being a thorough master of the Hebrew language, he generally gives the true sense of the Scriptures in a very few words without taking the student through the process of verbal criticism as Thu Ezra does. His commentary on Isaiah and Jeremiah, called inzn1 light and lerjection. and his exposition of The Song of Songs are printed in Frankfurter's great Rabbinical Bible, 4 vols. fol. Amsterdam 1724-1727 ; the com mentary an called mist..; 74;$72, which he wrote in 1506, was published in Venice 1517-1567 ; the commentary on the Psalms, corn ...
posed in 1512, was published in Venice 1590.— C. D. G.
xviii. 26; Dan. ii. 4). The Aramaic language— that whole, of which the Chaldee and Syriac dialects form parts— constitutes the northern and least developed branch of the Syro-Arabian family. Its cradle was probably on the banks of the Cyrus, according to the best interpretation of Amos ix. 7 ; but Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Syria form what may be considered its home and proper domain. Political events, however, subse quently caused it to supplant Hebrew in Palestine ; and then it became the prevailing form of speech from the Tigris to the shore of the Mediterranean, and, in a contrary direction, from Armenia down to the confines of Arabia. After obtaining such a wide dominion, it was forced, from the ninth century onwards, to give way before the encroaching ascendency of Arabic ; and it now only survives, as a living tongue, among the Syrian Christians in the neighbourhood of Mosul.
According to historical records which trace the migrations of the Syro-Arabians from the East to the South-west, and also according to the compa ratively ruder form of the Aramaic language itself, we might suppose that it represents, even in the state in which we have it, some image of that ab original type which the Hebrews and Arabians, under more favourable social and climatical in fluences, subsequently developed into fulness of sound and structure. But it is difficult for us now
to discern the particular vestiges of this archaic form ; for, not only did the Aramaic not work out its own development of the original elements common to the whole Syro-Arabian sisterhood of languages, but it was pre-eminently exposed, both by neighbourhood and by conquest, to harsh col lision with languages of an utterly different family. Moreover, it is the only one of the three great Syro-Arabian branches which has no fruits of a purely national literature to boast of. Vie possess no monument whatever of its own genius ; not any work which may be considered the product of the political and religious culture of the nation, and characteristic of it—as is so emphatically the case both with the Hebrews and the Arabs. The first time we see the language, it is used by Jews as the vehicle of Jewish thought ; and although when we next meet it, it is employed by native authors, yet they write under the literary impulses of Christianity, and under the Greek influence on thought and language which necessarily accom panied that religion. These two modifications, which constitute and define the so-called Chaldee and Syriac dialects, are the only forms in which the normal and standard Aramaic has been pre served to us.
It is evident, from these circumstances, that, up to a certain period, the Aramaic language has no other history than that of its relations to Hebrew. The earliest notice we have of its separate existence is in Gen. xxxi. 47, where Laban, in giving his own name to the memorial heap, employs words which are genuine Aramaic both in form and use. The next instance is in 2 Kings xviii. 26, where it appears that the educated Jews understood Aramaic, but that the common people did not. A striking illustration of its prevalence is found in the circum stance that it is employed, as the language of official communication, in the edict addressed by the Persian court to its subjects in Palestine (Ezra iv.