Interesting. I was under the impression that after Jerusalem fell the surviving Pharisees removed books from what we call the OT, books Christians found very effective in converting Jews to Christ, because they weren't originally written in Hebrew. Now this says that one of the two major books wasn't in Hebrew either.
If Aramaic is as acceptable as Hebrew, there's no real good logic behind not accepting something written in Greek. Particularly since there have been earlier versions of some of those OT books that actually were written in Hebrew rather than Greek.
Anyone know why Aramaic would be acceptable and not Greek?
There were no books removed. Christians just made it up. The Jewish canon was closed before the Second Temple was built.
The Mishna was written in classic Hebrew, followed (hundreds of years later) by the Gemara, in Aramaic.
http://www.torah.org/learning/basics/primer/torah/oraltorah.html
The Septuagint was Greek. I don’t think the language was the problem, and thei is the first I’ve heard that books were excluded from the Bible because they were in Greek.
The Jewish Bible is in Hebrew, all of it. I’m not sure about the Talmud, but it’s possible that the Gemara was in Aramaic. I think it was written in Babylonia, and at any rate, when it was composed, Aramaic was the dominant language of the middle east.
Some the Jewish mystical tracts were in Aramaic, the Zohar, for one, and the Ketubah, the marriage contract, is in Aramaic, as is all but the last verse of the mourners’ prayer.