A bridge between traditions

Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic are sister languages. They share roots, structures, and a fundamental understanding of the word as living force rather than fixed concept. This means the Semitic reading of the Gospels belongs to no single tradition. It belongs to the entire Semitic family. A Muslim, a Jew, and a Christian can sit before the same root and recognize something of their own in it. The interreligious bridge is not a diplomatic construction. It already existed in the language.

The method: reading the Peshitta from the root

Semitic languages work differently from the ones most Western readers know. English, Greek, and Latin define. Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic radiate. Every word grows from a triliteral root — three consonants that generate entire families of related meanings. A root does not deliver a sealed concept. It opens a force field. What a dictionary renders as a single word, in Syriac pulses in many directions at once.

This matters when the text in question is the New Testament. The canonical Gospels were composed in Greek. The Peshitta is the Syriac translation made by Aramaic-speaking Christian scholars in the fourth and fifth centuries — speakers of Edessene Syriac, a dialect of the same Aramaic family Jesus spoke, working centuries downstream of the events. The Peshitta is therefore not a recovery of Jesus's own words. It is something more specific and equally valuable: a record of how a community whose first language was Aramaic chose to render the Greek New Testament into their own Semitic semantic field.

The idea behind this application, drawn from the work of Vicente Haya (Abdelmumin Aya), philosopher and Arabist at the University of Seville, is straightforward: read the Peshitta from the root. Set the Greek source, the Syriac translation, and the modern translations side by side, and let the Syriac root structure open a hermeneutic dimension that Greek-only or modern-only reading does not. We do not claim the Peshitta recovers an Aramaic original of the Greek New Testament. We claim that reading the Peshitta with attention to roots opens a comparative semantic depth across the Greek source, the Syriac translation, and modern translations — a depth that is genuinely there in the language and that translation routinely flattens. The method is systematized in this tool by Jossi Fresco.

The five tasks

The method is built on five steps accessible to anyone willing to look closely:

• 1. Compare translations. Translations diverge at the exact points where the Syriac of the Peshitta says something no translator could fully resolve into Greek or modern languages. The disagreements are the map: they show where to dig.
• 2. Consult the Peshitta. Go to the Syriac text and identify the precise verbal or nominal form used.
• 3. Search biblical concordances. Where else does this same root appear in Scripture? Recurring patterns reveal deep meaning. Interpret the Bible from the Bible.
• 4. Explore the full family of the root. Gather every word born from the same three consonants. From that family emerges the root flavor — not a definition, but a living semantic field, something experienced more than understood.
• 5. Produce the expansion of meaning. Not an alternative translation. An expansion that lets the reader inhabit the space the Syriac word opens.

What appears when you look

Two examples show the difference clearly.

Constellations of meaning

A central tool of this method is the constellation of meaning. A passage works like a night sky. The triliteral roots within it form patterns — constellations — that illuminate each other.

The Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) contains at least three recognizable constellations. The constellation of Names: the root Q-R-A ("to call") appears five times, shema' ("name") four. The constellation of Conception and Fertility: virgin, betrothed, womb, and the quietly remarkable detail that this happens "in the sixth month" — which in the Aramaic calendar marks the month of irrigation, the month when water enters the fields to bring forth life. The constellation of Power: throne, kingdom, force, lord.

These patterns are not decorative. They are structural. Making them visible transforms how the text is read.

Peshitta Constellations

This application translates the method into working tools. The home page offers two search modes:

• Root search — type a triliteral root (e.g., SH-L-M) and retrieve all its attested forms in the Peshitta, with biblical references, Hebrew and Arabic cognates, and sister roots. Try N-P-SH: the root that in Aramaic weaves "soul," "to breathe," "to rest," and "to multiply" into a single field of meaning.
• Word search — search any word in English or Spanish and find the Aramaic roots behind it. For example, shalom.

From the search results you can access:

• Root visualization — an interactive graph that unfolds the full family of a root: every form, meaning, and connection between them. The root flavor made visible.
• Root card — every attested form of a root, its meanings, biblical references, Hebrew and Arabic cognates, and sister roots gathered in a single view.
• Interlinear reading — the Peshitta text verse by verse with transliteration, gloss, and translation, accessible from any biblical reference.
• Constellations — the star-map of a passage: each triliteral root displayed as a node, with connections between roots that illuminate the deep structure of the text.

We do not claim to replace careful study. We aim to give any curious person the tools to take the first steps and discover, through their own exploration, that it truly does taste better in Aramaic.

How the cognate, outlier, and Greek-parallel data was generated

The structured datasets behind the cognate tables, semantic-outlier flags, cross-root semantic bridges, and Greek New Testament parallels were produced in two stages:

1. LLM-assisted generation. Each Syriac root was processed through Claude API scripts with a Semitic-linguistics system prompt and structured-JSON output, generating candidate Hebrew and Arabic cognates, outlier flags, and Greek parallels.
2. Lexicographic audit against print sources. A subsequent audit reviewed 403 roots against Payne Smith (Syriac), BDB (Hebrew), and Lane (Arabic), identifying 205 issues — 54 critical and 151 refinements — which were corrected in the dataset.

What this means. This is not a hand-curated lexicographic project on the order of HALOT or Sokoloff. It is a structured machine-generated dataset that has been audited against three standard print lexicons and corrected. Treat individual cognate claims as starting points for verification, not as final lexicographic authority. No formal precision/recall against a hand-curated test set has been published, and "true cognates" inherited from a common Proto-Semitic ancestor are not formally distinguished from chance triliteral matches or later borrowings — both surface here as "cognate" entries. Scholarly users working on diachronic Semitic philology should consult Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum and Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for genuine etymological provenance.

Sidestepping the religious sense: the principle behind sabor raíz

Lexicons tend to gloss Semitic roots toward their religious or theological sense whenever that sense is dominant in the receiving tradition. Vicente Haya has insisted that this displaces the actual semantic core of the root toward a derived application, and that the sabor raíz ("root flavour") field should recover the concrete, everyday sense the broader Semitic family preserves.

The canonical example is the root H-M-N / A-M-N (Syriac haymanûtâ', Hebrew emunah, Arabic imân). Almost every dictionary translates this root as "faith / belief" because that is its dominant theological use. But Arabic preserves the concrete field with immediate clarity:

• amân — the protection granted by one who has the power to destroy you (the sovereign safe-conduct)
• amâna — a deposit entrusted to someone's care
• amîn — the one with whom you know you are safe
• amn — security itself; in modern Arabic, at-ta'mîn al-ijtimā'ī is "Social Security"

The root flavour, then, is not "faith" but "security" — and from it derive protection, entrusted deposit, and proven loyalty. Faith is an application of that concrete field to the relational dimension with the divine, not its core. In this tool, the sabor raíz field aims to follow this principle: foreground the concrete, everyday sense of the Semitic field, and treat the religious gloss as one downstream application.

References

The hermeneutic method underlying this tool draws on the work of Vicente Haya (Abdelmumin Aya), philosopher and Arabist at the University of Seville. His principal works on the subject:

• El arameo en sus labios (Fragmenta, 2013)
• Belleza y profundidad (Fragmenta, 2021)
• Descolonizar a Jesucristo (Akal, 2018)
• El Padrenuestro en arameo (Vaso Roto)
• La Luz del arameo (Almuzara, 2025)

Reference dictionaries

The cognate and root data in this application is cross-checked against three authoritative lexicons, one for each sister language:

• Syriac: J. Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford, 1903)
• Hebrew: Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) — available at Sefaria
• Arabic: Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (London, 1863–1893)

Why these three. Payne Smith remains the standard practical Syriac reference for non-specialist readers; Sokoloff's 2009 update of Brockelmann is the modern scholarly successor and is recommended for academic work. BDB and Lane were chosen for accessibility (both are public-domain, freely available online, and widely cross-referenced); for current Hebrew lexicography most academic work cites HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), and for classical Arabic many scholars now use Wehr or Lisan al-Arab. Both HALOT and Wehr remain in copyright and were not used here.

Text corpus

The Syriac text powering this application comes from the ETCBC/syrnt corpus (Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer, VU Amsterdam), a plain-text Unicode dataset covering the traditional 22-book Peshitta New Testament canon. It is a consonantal text: it does not include supralinear marks such as syame (plural dots), rukkakha/qushshaya, or vowel points. This limitation is intentional for triliteral root analysis, where the consonantal skeleton is what matters, but it means the text shown in the interlinear reader lacks the full pointing a Syriac reader would expect.

Note: This corpus does not constitute a critical edition. It includes no textual apparatus or variant readings. For academic text-critical work, consult the Leiden Peshitta Institute edition or George Kiraz's Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels.

The traditional Peshitta NT canon contains 22 books. Five books (2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and Revelation) were not part of the original Syriac canon and are excluded from this corpus. Their absence is not an application error but a faithful reflection of the Peshitta textual tradition.

Transliteration convention

This application uses a simplified romanization for accessibility, not SBL academic transliteration. The following table shows the mappings:

ʾ	Aleph	'	ʔ
ܒ	Beth	b	b
ܓ	Gamal	g	ɡ
ܕ	Dalath	d	d
ܗ	He	h	h
ܘ	Waw	w	w
ܙ	Zayn	z	z
ܚ	Heth	kh	ħ
ܛ	Teth	T	tˤ
ܝ	Yod	y	j
ܟ	Kaph	k	k
ܠ	Lamadh	l	l
ܡ	Mim	m	m
ܢ	Nun	n	n
ܣ	Semkath	s	s
ܥ	Ayin	e	ʕ
ܦ	Pe	p	p
ܨ	Tsade	ts	sˤ
ܩ	Qoph	q	q
ܪ	Resh	r	r
ܫ	Shin	sh	ʃ
ܬ	Taw	th	t

For standard academic transliteration, see the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conventions in their Handbook of Style.

Further reading

The following reference works are recommended for deeper study of Syriac grammar and lexicography:

• Nöldeke, Theodor. Compendious Syriac Grammar. London: Williams & Norgate, 1904.
• Brockelmann, Carl. Lexicon Syriacum. 2nd ed. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1928.
• Sokoloff, Michael. A Syriac Lexicon: A Translation from the Latin, Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann's Lexicon Syriacum. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns/Gorgias Press, 2009.
• Costaz, Louis. Dictionnaire Syriaque-Français / Syriac-English Dictionary. 3rd ed. Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 2002.
• Kiraz, George A. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

Cite this project

Fresco, J. (2026). Peshitta Constellations (v1.0.0). Zenodo.