technical religious words, but a few were everyday words like עץ "wood". Conversely, Aramaic words, such as māmmôn "wealth", were borrowed into Hebrew, and Hebrew words acquired additional senses from Aramaic. For instance, Hebrew ראוי rā'ûi "seen" borrowed the sense "worthy, seemly" from the Aramaic meaning "seen" and "worthy". The Greek of the New Testament preserves some semiticisms, including transliterations of Semitic words. Some are Aramaic, like talitha (ταλιθα), which represents the noun טליתא , and others may be either Hebrew or Aramaic like רבוני Rabbounei (Ραββουνει), which means "my master/great one/teacher" in both languages. Other examples: "Talitha kumi" (טליתא קומי) "Ephphatha" (אתפתח) "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" (?אלי, אלי, למה שבקתני) The 2004 film The Passion of the Christ used Aramaic for much of its dialogue, specially reconstructed by a scholar, William Fulco, S.J. Where the appropriate words (in first-century Aramaic) were no longer known, he used the Aramaic of Daniel and fourth-century Syriac and Hebrew as the basis for his work. Middle Aramaic The 3rd century AD is taken as the threshold between Old and Middle Aramaic. During that century, the nature of the various Aramaic languages and dialects began to change. The descendants of Imperial Aramaic ceased to be living languages, and the eastern and western regional languages began to develop vital new literatures. Unlike many of the dialects of Old Aramaic, much is known about the vocabulary and grammar of Middle Aramaic. Eastern Middle Aramaic The dialects of Old Eastern Aramaic continued in Assyria, Mesopotamia, Armenia and Iran as a written language using the Estragela Edessa script. Eastern Aramaic comprises Mandean, Assyrian, Babylonian Jewish Aramaic dialects, and Syriac (what emerged as the classical literary dialect of Syriac differs in some small details from the Syriac of the earlier pagan inscriptions from the Edessa area). Syriac Aramaic Syriac Aramaic (also "Classical Syriac") is the literary, liturgical and often spoken language of Syriac Christianity. It originated by the first century AD in the region of Osroene, centered in Edessa, but its golden age was the fourth to eight centuries. This period began with the translation of the Bible into the language: the Peshitta, and the masterful prose and poetry of Ephrem the Syrian. Classical Syriac became the language of the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Syriac Orthodox Church and later the Nestorian Church. Missionary activity led to the spread of Syriac from Mesopotamia and Persia, into Central