"Feminine images cluster around the Spirit, as the Syriac word for spirit, ruha, is itself feminine.”
"An early stream of Aramaic-Syriac Christian tradition portrayed the
Spirit as feminine… In the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Holy Spirit is
seen as Christ's mother and also the power that transports him to the
mountain of his transfiguration. In this gospel, Christ says, "Even
so did my mother, the Holy Spirit, take me by one of my hairs and
carry me away unto the great Mountain, Tabor."
The most lush development of female images for the Spirit is found in
the second-century Syriac hymns the Odes of Solomon. The language of
these hymns is poetic, non philosophical, and explains a plurality of
images for the believer's transformed life through communion with the
divine. Feminine images cluster around the Spirit, as the Syriac word
for spirit, ruha, is itself feminine."
Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History
By Rosemary Radford Ruether, University of California Press; 2006,
page 132
The Qur'an uses two terms "Ruh-Allah" and "Ar-Ruh-Al-Qudus" for the
Spirit of God. Such is the case in the following references: "We gave
unto Jesus, son of Mary, clear proofs [of Allah's sovereignty], and
we supported him with the Holy Spirit [ar-Ruh-al Qudus]," (Surah 2,
Al-Baqarah, The Cow: 87).
"When Allah saith: O Jesus, son of Mary! Remember My favour unto thee
and unto thy mother; how I strengthened thee with the Holy Spirit [al-
Ruh al-Qudus], so that the Scripture and Wisdom and the Torah and the
Gospel . . . and thou didst heal him who was born blind and the leper
by My permission; and how thou didst raise the dead, by My
permission" (Surah 5 Al-Ma'idah, The Table Spread: 110).
"Go, O my sons, and ascertain concerning Joseph and his brother, and
despair not the Spirit of Allah [Ruh-Allah]" (Surah 12, Joseph: 87).
"Say (O Muhammad): The Holy Spirit hath revealed it (the Quran) from
thy Lord with Truth, that it may confirm the faith of those who
believe and as a guidance and Good Tidings (gospels) for those who
have Surrendered (to Allah)." 16:102
"And thus have We inspired in thee (Muhammad) a Spirit of Our
Command. Thou knowest not what the Scripture was nor what the Faith.
But We have made it a light whereby We guide whom We will of Our
bondmen. And lo! Thou verily dost guide unto a right path., the path
of Allah, unto whom belongs whatsoever is in the heavens and
whatsoever is in the earth. Do not all things reach Allah at last?"
42:52-53
"And lo! It (the Quran) is a revelation of the Lord of the Worlds
which the True Spirit hath brought down upon thy heart, that thou
mayest be one of the warners in plain Arabic speech." 26:192-195
Note: The above quotations from the Qur'an make reference to God, to
His Word, and to His Spirit. Ruh is Allah’s own attribute given to human
beings. The Quran doesn’t say the ruh of man but Ruh of Allah. In Aramaic,
Ruha d-Qudsha means "the spirit of holiness" (corresponding to Hebrew:
Ruah ha-Qodes, and Arabic: ar-Ruh-al Qudus). For Jews, Muslims and
Syriac-speaking Christians it signifies the Holy Spirit mentioned in
both the Quran and the Bible.
For four hundred years the word Holy Spirit was ruha, a feminine word derived from the Hebrew ruach
"Christian Misogyny
Rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures and flourishing in a patriarchal
culture, Christianity developed its own negative attitudes towards
women and the old religion of the Goddess. At times subtle, at other
times brutal, the movement was away from partnership and towards
hierarchy, from feminine images of the Divine to strictly masculine
ones. Despite Jesus' radical inclusion of women as friends and
disciples and his refusal to treat them as second-rate, sinfully
sexual, or stupid, his followers quickly established as orthodox an
all-male priesthood, a masculine Trinity, and a theologically
expressed aversion to women.
Thus Tertullian, a Christian theologian in the third century,
described Eve as the gateway to the devil because, according to the
Genesis myth, she first broke God's law and brought about the loss of
original purity. He held her personally responsible for the death of
Christ, and his general distrust and distaste of women was based on
this rationale.
Origin, a theologian contemporary with Tertullian, wrote of the
feminine and the corporeal as essentially one, and unworthy of God.
He believed that God saw only the masculine and spiritual aspects of
creation, since the Creator could surely not be expected to stoop so
low as to regard the feminine and fleshy. St. Jerome, writing a
century later, expressed this same equation of woman with sexuality
and sin by reasoning that since Paul had written that it is well for
a man not to touch a woman (1 Cor 7:1), then it must always be bad to
touch a woman. Women were dangerously physical, inferior to men at
best and destructive to the eternal souls at worst.
Virginity and celibacy therefore became elevated as spiritually more
pure than marriage or sexual activity of any kind, and sexual sin was
judged severely. Expressions of Christianity such as Gnosticism that
gave women and men an equal place in the community, in liturgy, and
in leadership, and that refereed to the Godhead as "Mother" as well
as "Father" were suppressed as heretical, and their sacred writings
were destroyed.
Where the Wisdom tradition was brought to bear on Christology, with
Christ seen as the incarnation of God' eternal and universal wisdom,
the feminine word Sophia was replaced by the masculine Logos. And in
Syria, where for four hundred years the word Holy Spirit was ruha, a
feminine word derived from the Hebrew ruach, and where the Holy
Spirit was described as Mother, complementing the parental imagery of
Father and Son in the Trinity, the association of feminine language
with heresy led authors to assign masculine gender to the word—
grammatical nonsense but evidence of the theological desire to
defeminize the Divine."
She changes everything: seeking the divine on a feminist path
Lucy Reid, pages 32-33
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2 Feb 2006)
ISBN: 978 0567026316
Syriac language
"Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across
much of the Fertile Crescent. Classical Syriac became a major
literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th
centuries.[1] It was the classical language of Edessa, preserved in a
large body of Syriac literature.
It became the vehicle of Eastern Christianity and culture, spreading
throughout Asia as far as Malabar and Eastern China and was the
medium of communication and cultural dissemination for Arabs and, to
a lesser extent, Persians. Primarily a Christian medium of
expression, Syriac had a fundamental cultural and literary influence
on the development of Arabic which replaced it towards the end of the
eighth century. Syriac remains the liturgical language of Syriac
Christianity.
Syriac is a Middle Aramaic language, and as such a language of the
Western branch of the Semitic family.
Syriac is written in the Syriac alphabet, a derivation of the Aramaic
alphabet."
www.en.wikipedia.org/
Aramaic language
"Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history.[2] It has
been the language of administration of empires and the language of
divine worship. It was the day-to-day language of Israel in the
Second Temple period (539 BCE – 70 CE), the original language of
large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, likely to
have been the mother tongue of Jesus of Nazareth and is the main
language of the Talmud.[3]
Aramaic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Within that
diverse family, it belongs to the Semitic subfamily. Aramaic is a
part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes
the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. Aramaic script
was widely adopted for other languages, and is ancestral to the
Arabic and Hebrew alphabets.
Aramaic's long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the
development of many divergent varieties which are sometimes treated
as dialects. Thus, there is no one Aramaic language, but each time
and place has had its own variety. Aramaic is retained as a
liturgical language by certain Eastern Christian sects, in the form
of Syriac, the Aramaic variety by which Eastern Christianity was
diffused, whether or not those communities once spoke it or another
form of Aramaic as their vernacular, but have since shifted to
another language as their primary community language.
Modern Aramaic is spoken today as a first language by many scattered,
predominantly small, and largely isolated communities of differing
Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups of the Middle East[4]—most
numerously by the Assyrians in the form of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic—that
have all retained use of the once dominant lingua franca despite
subsequent language shifts experienced throughout the Middle East.
The Aramaic languages are considered to be endangered.[5]…
Old Aramaic
The term `Old Aramaic' is used to describe the varieties of the
language from its first known use until the point roughly marked by
the rise of the Sasanian Empire (224 CE), dominating the influential,
eastern dialect region. As such, the term covers over thirteen
centuries of the development of Aramaic. This vast time span includes
all Aramaic that is now effectively extinct."
www.en.wikipedia.org/
1. Beyer, Klaus; John F. Healey (trans.) (1986). The Aramaic
Language: its distribution and subdivisions. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht. pp. 44. ISBN 3-525-53573-2.
2. Aramaic appears somewhere between 11th and 9th centuries BCE.
Beyer (1986: 11) suggests that written Aramaic probably dates from
the eleventh century BCE, as it is established by the tenth century,
to which he dates the oldest inscriptions of northern Syria.
Heinrichs (1990: x) uses the less controversial date of ninth
century, for which there is clear and widespread attestation.
3. Beyer 1986: 38–43; Casey 1998: 83–6, 88, 89–93; Eerdmans 1975: 72.
4. Heinrichs 1990: xi–xv; Beyer 1986: 53.
5.Naby, Eden. From Lingua Franca to Endangered Language. Assyrian
International News Agency.
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