Keep Up Your Biblical Aramaic in Two Minutes a Day: 365 Selections for Easy Review

Most of us who have studied Biblical Aramaic in seminary or graduate school find it difficult to read the Aramaic portions of the Bible with ease or solid comprehension. Keep Up Your Biblical Aramaic in Two Minutes a Day has been specially designed to help you read a small amount of Biblical Aramaic daily, in a manageable, enriching, and enjoyable way. It does not replace the need for a grammar or textbook; rather, it complements grammatical study by helping you to build a robust vocabulary and to review morphology and syntax in a completely inductive way, and without using any grammatical jargon. The page for each day presents:

• two new vocabulary words (for most of the book), with transliteration and definitions, beginning with the most common words and proceeding to the rarest
• the English text of a verse from Daniel or Ezra, with the day’s two Aramaic words embedded in it, as they appear in the verse
• the Aramaic text of the verse, in full and then divided into phrases or clauses, with the corresponding English phrases or clauses next to them

More than one-third of the words in Biblical Aramaic appear only once in the Bible. When these hapax legomena begin to be presented in Keep Up Your Biblical Aramaic in Two Minutes a Day (about three-fifths of the way through the book), all that appear in a particular verse (whether this be one hapax legomenon, two, or several) are presented together as the new words for the day. The result is that—although there are 716 unique vocabulary words in Biblical Aramaic—by the time you reach the end of this book you will have seen every single one of these words. And during this process, you will have read most (about 80 percent) of the Aramaic verses found in the Bible!

Jonathan G. Kline (PhD, Harvard University) is the author of Allusive Soundplay in the Hebrew Bible and co-author of Biblical Aramaic: A Reader & Handbook. He currently serves as the academic editor at Hendrickson Publishers.