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• After the exile, as we saw when Ezra had to translate the Law of Moses to the people, many of the people were by this time more familiar with Aramaic than Hebrew. They had adopted the languages and accents of the people around them. And as time went on, they became less and less familiar with Hebrew, and more and more familiar with Aramaic. Around the time of Ezra, the tradition of creating Targums, or Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, was already happening.
• Around the time of Jesus, the Aramaic Targums were still in use. Most likely, the Aramaic Peshitta Old Testament was in use too, possibly even going back to the Jews’ time in Babylon. And in the first and second century, as the Jews started to write the Talmud, the Talmud (the Gemara, the commentary on the Mishnah) was also written in Aramaic. The Mishnah, although technically Hebrew, has a lot of features of Aramaic, meaning that Hebrew and Aramaic had heavily influenced each other. And going further still into the times of the Massoretes in the 6th to the 11th centuries, the Massoretes adopted Aramaic notes on the Hebrew text, preserved in the Massorah which we have today.