The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with the exception of a few parts, namely, Ezra 4:7 to 6:18, 7:12-16, and Daniel 2:5 to 7: 28, which were in Aramaic. Hebrew, the language of the children of Israel down to the fifth century B.C., was displaced by Aramaic as the spoken tongue after the return of the Israelites from exile, and it remained only as the language of literature. Thereafter it became the practice, when the Scriptures were read in public assemblies, to include also a translation into Aramaic. Thus in Nehemiah 8:8 we read, "So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading." This was probably the beginning of the Targums, or paraphrases in Aramaic.
Our Authorized and Revised Versions of the Old Testament are translations mainly from the Hebrew. The "Revisers' Preface to the Old Testament" contains much that is both interesting and instructive to Bible students, for example, "The Revisers have thought it most prudent to adopt the Massoretic (that is the Received Hebrew) Text as the basis of their work, and to depart from it, as the Authorized Translators had done, only in exceptional cases."
The Massoretes were a group of scholars responsible for the accuracy of the Old Testament text from about 400 a.d, to 1000 A.D. Before their time the Hebrew writings had been recorded by means of consonants only; they added the vowels and accents in accordance with the traditional readings (that is, the Talmud) and made marginal notes. From this text our Hebrew printed Bible is derived.
