What were the original languages the Bible was written in? How did we get the Bible? Is the Bible corrupted by men when they were translated?
Good questions!
The Bible was written in two main languages, Hebrew in the Old Testament, and Greek for the New Testament. Two other languages appear briefly. One of them is Aramaic. A few chapters in Ezra and Daniel were originally in Aramaic and one verse in Jeremiah, also.
There are a few words in another, fourth language that appears extremely briefly for a few words in Job, and that’s Ugaritic. The Ugaritic does’t impact the original Bible’s reading and interpreting so much as it does in helping to understand the Hebrew overall.
Two thousand tablets written in Ugaritic were discovered in 1929. The Kingdom of Ugarit was located in Syria, and was a thriving kingdom of the late Bronze Age (1570 – 1200 BC.) It co-existed with the Hebrew tribes and,
The Ugaritic texts offer innumerable literary and religious parallels to biblical literature. The parallels are so rich and in some cases so specific that it is evident that the Ugaritic texts do not merely provide parallels, but belong to a shared or overlapping cultural matrix with the Hebrew Bible. (Source)
The Ugaritic language was almost letter for letter identical to Hebrew, and where the Hebrew word was unknown or difficult to interpret in context, the Ugaritic texts helped as a kind of Rosetta Stone in interpreting the Hebrew biblical word properly.
Continue reading “The discovery of 2000 year old Leviticus fragment”