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• Thus, after the exile, the people no longer understood Hebrew properly. Ezra and the Levites have to targum (or translate), the Hebrew Scriptures for them, into Aramaic, to make sure they understand what is being read to them. In this way, the tradition of the Aramaic Targums, or translations, came about. Whereas at this stage these Targums were spoken, they soon became written down, to form the Aramaic Targums which we have today.
• As we saw in the lesson on the Babylonian exile, ever since the days of Ezra, the Jews have a tradition that one should read the Hebrew text twice and the Aramaic text once.
• And so, the Jews, now in positions of power and authority in the Medo-Persian Empire, continued to speak Aramaic as their everyday language. Let us take a closer look at how mighty and how vast that Empire was, with Aramaic at its heart and as its lingua franca, or common language.