| Galilean dialect | |
|---|---|
| Region | Galilee |
| Ethnicity | Galileans |
| Era | Second Temple period |
| Aramaic alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| IETF | jpa-u-sd-ilz |
 The Galilee region | |
TheGalilean dialect was the form ofJewish Palestinian Aramaic spoken by people inGalilee during theClassical period, for example at the time ofJesus and the disciples, as distinct from the Judean dialect spoken inJerusalem.[1][2]
TheAramaic of Jesus, 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 thebrazier the night of Jesus' trial (seeMatthew 26:73 andMark 14:70).
In the 17th and 18th centuries,John Lightfoot andJohann Christian Schöttgen identified and commented on the Galilean Aramaic speech. Schöttgen's workHorae Ebraicae et Talmudicae, which studied the New Testament in the context of theTalmud, followed that of Lightfoot. Both scholars provided examples of differences between Galilean and Judean speech.[3]
The 19th century grammarianGustaf Dalman identified "Galilean Aramaic” in the grammar of the Palestinian Talmud and Midrash,[4] but he was doubted byTheodor Zahn, who raised issues with using the grammar of writings from the 4th–7th centuries to reconstruct the Galilean Aramaic of the 1st century.[5]
Porter (2000) notes that scholars have tended to be "vague" in describing exactly what a "Galilean dialect" entailed.[6] Hoehner (1983) notes that theTalmud 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.[7] Hugo Odeberg attempted a grammar based on the Aramaic of theGenesis Rabbah in 1939.[8] Michael Sokoloff's English preface to Caspar Levias's 1986A Grammar of Galilean Aramaic (in Hebrew) also sheds light on the controversy that began with Dalman.[citation needed]E. Y. Kutscher's 1976Studies in Galilean Aramaic may offer some newer insights.[citation needed] More recently, attempts at better understanding the Galilean dialect in the New Testament have been taken up by Steve Caruso,[9] who has spent over 10 years compiling a topical lexical reference of the Galilean dialect. Caruso has noted the difficulties of the task:
Galilean has proven to be one of the more obscure and misunderstood dialects due to systemic – albeit well-intentioned – corruption to its corpus over the centuries, involving the layering of Eastern scribal “corrections” away from genuineWestern dialect features. To this day there is no easily accessiblegrammar or fully articulatedsyntax, and due to the academic predisposition towards viewing Aramaic languages through anEastern Aramaic lens, assessing vocabulary with appropriate orthographical and dialectical considerations has proven difficult.[10]
Caruso has since published a nearly complete grammar in English.[11]
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 nameYeshu forJesus in the Talmud was 'almost certainly' a dialect form ofYeshua, based on the swallowing of theayin noted byPaul Billerbeck;[12] other scholars follow the traditional understanding of the name as a polemical reduction.[13]
It is generally agreed that Aramaic was the common language of Israel in the first century CE. Jesus and his disciples spoke the Galilean dialect, which was distinguished from that of Jerusalem (Matt. 26:73).