There are exceptions to the unwritten rules of Arabic hospitality. I quickly learned them when I asked the Cairo hookah bar proprietors where the bathroom was in my Midwestern Arabic. After a few ...

MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember when old people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by a ...

What do these three locales have in common: a remote village in Syria; Sydney, Australia; and the Old City of Jerusalem? The answer is: Aramaic, a dominant language in the ancient world. Now, Jews, ...

Qaraqosh, Tel Kepe, and Karamlesh are just three of the Iraqi towns on the Nineveh plains captured in early August by the Islamic State (IS), but they represent the last major concentration of Aramaic ...

You get asked some pretty strange things when you speak the language of Jesus. The calls come to my father’s office at UCLA several times a year, often around Christmas or Easter. “Professor Yona ...

This Sunday's lectionary reading in Year A is the baptism of Jesus from Matt 3.13–17. It is a short and compact reading, and ...

A nun lights candles in the Syrian village of Maalula, in of the world's oldest Christian settlements - Copyright AFP VALERIE BAERISWYL A nun lights candles in the ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...