Who Were the Arameans

Who Were the Arameans?

My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small household and lived there as an alien. But there he became a nation great, strong, and numerous.
Deuteronomy 26:5

The Old Testament mentions the Arameans about seventy times. Unfortunately, many Bible translations refer to the Arameans incorrectly as "Syrians." The Arameans were a group of linguistically related Semitic peoples living in what is today Syria and western Iraq. Their influence and presence spanned the region of the Fertile Crescent. According to the Table of Nations in Genesis 10:22, Aram, the ancestral father of the Arameans, was a grandson of Noah and a son of Noah's firstborn son, Shem. Genesis 22:20-24 lists twelve Aramean tribes that came to live in the east and northeast of what became the nation of Israel.¹ Jewish tradition places Aram's portion of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, north of the Chaldeans who were south of the Euphrates: And for Aram there came forth the fourth portion, al the land of Mesopotamia [Naharaim] between the Tigris and the Euphrates to the north of the Chaldees to the border of the mountains of Asshur and the land of "Arara" (Book of Jubilees, 9.5). The Arameans controlled several small, commercially prosperous city-states that were never united under one ruler to form a united empire. The various groups of Aramean peoples had different traditions and ambitions, but what they had in common was a shared Aramaic language.

Paddan-Aram ("plain of Aram") was an Aramean region in upper (northwestern) Mesopotamia that was important in the story of Abraham's family (Gen 25:20; 28:2; 31:18; cf Gen 24:10). Paddan-Aram was part of Aram-Naharaim ("Aram of the two rivers"), an area associated with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in northwestern Mesopotamia but along the upper Euphrates. According to rabbinic Jewish tradition, Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abraham, was also located in Aram-Naharaim. The Old Testament mentions the regions of Paddan-Aram and Aram-Naharaim several times.²Three of the Egyptian Armana tablets identified these regions as Nahrima in a geographical description of the Kingdom of Mitanni.³

Haran, in Paddan-Aram, was a city/region on the Balikh river and an important Aramean commercial center. It was where Terah immigrated with his sons, Abraham, Nahor, and Haran, after leaving Ur of the Chaldees. It was from Haran in the region of Paddan-aram that Abraham obeyed God's call to immigrate to Canaan (Gen 11:31, 32; 12:4-5). Abraham considered himself an Aramean and his son Isaac and grandson Jacob married Aramean girls from Haran who were their kinswomen (Gen 24:2-4, 66; 28:1-2; 29:28-30). Deuteronomy 26:5 refers to Jacob-Isael as a "wandering Aramean." Paddan-Aram and the city of Haran fell to the Assyrians in the 13^th century BC (2 Kng 19:12). Haran in the center of Aramean activity in Genesis while Aram-Damascus is the central topic for the Arameans in 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles.

One of the most politically influential Aramean city-states was Aram-Damascus. It came under the control of the Davidic Kingdom (2 Sam 8:5) but later asserted its independence (1 Kng 11:23-25). The Arameans often had dealings with the Northern Kingdom of Israel under the period of the Divided Kingdoms of Israel and Judah and functioned as both friends and enemies (1 Kng 20).

In 732 BC, Assyrian King Tiglath-pileser III conquered the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus and the Northern Kingdom of Israel, making both kingdoms part of the Assyrian Empire (2 Kng 16:7-9; 17:6; 18:9-11). As the Assyrian Empire swallowed up the various Aramean polities, it also ingested masses of Aramaic speaking peoples along with their scribal and literary traditions. Aramaic eventually replaced the Assyrian's Akkadian language as the lingua franca of the entire Middle East. Aramaic was the language of administration and commerce of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires. Arameans fought in the army of the Babylonians and were among the forces of Nebuchadnezzar in the conquest of Judah and Jerusalem in the 6^th-century BC (2 Kng 24:1-2; Jer 35:11).

The citizens of the Southern Kingdom of Judah did not give up Hebrew for Aramaic until after their return from their seventy-year Babylonian exile when Aramaic became the common tongue of Judah and the entire Levant. It was the common language of 4^th-century BC Hellenistic Levant and the language of the Jews under the Roman domination Judea when Hebrew became a liturgical language of the ministerial priesthood. Jesus spoke His Gospel of salvation in Aramaic to the Jewish crowds, and it was the language of the earliest Christians. Aramaic continues to survive as a living language in small communities in the Middle East, and it is the liturgical language of the Syriac and Assyrian Christian Churches. The Aramean language turned out to be the ancient Arameans most enduring legacy.

Endnotes:
1. Twelve fathers of the twelve Aramean tribes listed in Genesis 22:20-24: Uz, Buz, Kemuel, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, Bethuel, Ebah, Gaham, Tahash, and Maacah.

2. Old Testament references: Paddan-Aram= Gen 25:20; 28:2, 5, 6, 7; 31:18; 33:18; 35:9, 26; 45:15. Aram-Naharaim = Gen 24:10; Judg 3:8; Ps 60:2/1 or in title.

3. The Kingdom of Mitanni flourished from about 1500 to 1360 BC. The Egyptian texts called the region Naharin which is why they were believed to have a link to the Arameans. However, most historians believe the Mitannians were an Indo-Iranian, Hurrian-speaking people. Located in northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia, at its height the empire extended from Kirkuk and the Zagros Mountains in the east through Assyria to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. Its heartland was the Khabur River region and the probable location of the Mitannian capital, Wassukkani.