Aramaic names

Aramaic is an ancient Semitic language of the Near East, closely related to Hebrew but distinct from it. From roughly the eighth century BCE it served as an administrative language and lingua franca for a succession of empires, including the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian Achaemenid states. Parts of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and the language is widely thought to have been the everyday speech of Jesus and of first-century Judea. Aramaic is not fully extinct. It survives today in the Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities, and by some Jewish communities, in and around Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran.

Several names in the library carry this Aramaic inheritance directly. Thomas comes through Greek from the Aramaic ta'oma, meaning twin. It was the byname of the apostle Thomas, and the Gospel of John renders the same sense into Greek as Didymos, also twin. Maryam is the Aramaic and Arabic form of the name known in English as Mary and in Hebrew as Miriam. It remains common across the Middle East and North Africa, and it is the form used for the mother of Jesus in Aramaic and in the Quran.

Two other names reach Aramaic by more debated paths. Silas is associated with the companion of Paul in the Book of Acts. It is often explained as a Greek form of the Aramaic Se'ila, itself a version of the Hebrew name Saul, though some instead connect it to the Latin Silvanus. Tadeo is a Spanish form of Thaddeus, the Greek rendering of the Aramaic byname Taddai borne by one of the twelve apostles. The meaning of Taddai is uncertain. It has been linked to an Aramaic root for heart or breast, but scholars do not agree, and some propose that it reworks a Greek name. These names sit beside the Hebrew tradition, a closely related Semitic language, and reflect the shared world in which Aramaic and Hebrew were spoken side by side.