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Sacred Correspondences
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Three Faiths, One Family of Languages Underneath Them

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Three Faiths, One Family of Languages Underneath Them

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often discussed together as the Abrahamic religions, and their shared origin among Semitic-language-speaking peoples of the Near East is part of why: the Hebrew Bible was composed in Hebrew, an early form of Aramaic runs through parts of it and through the language of first century Judea, and the Quran was received and remains recited in Arabic, its language treated within Islam as inseparable from its meaning in a way translation cannot fully replace. The three traditions' scriptures, prophetic figures and core narratives grew out of the same broad linguistic and cultural world even as the religions themselves diverged sharply in doctrine and, for much of their shared history, stood in open conflict with one another.

That linguistic kinship does not translate into a shared modern identity. A Coptic Christian in Egypt, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, and a Sunni Muslim in Iraq are all, by the linguistic definition, part of the Semitic-language-speaking world, tracing their liturgical or scriptural language back to the same family tree, yet they belong to communities with little sense of common cause and, in various times and places, active hostility toward one another. Scholars of the ancient Near East generally treat the Semitic language family as exactly what it is, a tool for tracing linguistic descent, and caution against reading it as evidence of any deeper cultural or religious unity among the many peoples it happens to describe.

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