Biblical Aramaic
As Imperial Aramaic had served as a lingua franca throughout the Ancient Near East from the second half of the 8th century BC to the end of the 4th century BC,[5][6] linguistic contact with even the oldest stages of Biblical Hebrew, the main language of the Hebrew Bible, is easily accounted for.In 1929, Harold Rowley argued that its origin must be later than the 6th century BC and that the language was more similar to the targums than to the Imperial Aramaic documents available at his time.[7] Others have argued that the language most closely resembles the 5th-century BC Elephantine papyri, and so is a good representative of typical Imperial Aramaic, including Jongtae Choi's doctoral dissertation at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.[8] Kenneth Kitchen takes an agnostic position and states that the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel is compatible with any period from the 5th to early 2nd century BC.Some obvious similarities and differences are listed below:[11] Hebrew and Aramaic have simplified the inflections of the noun, adjective and verb.