from AramaicThis word originated in Syria
"No servant can serve two masters," Jesus told his disciples. "For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon."
These words are from the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in Matthew 6:24. Of course, Jesus didn't say them in English. He spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language in the Afro-Asiatic language family. But thanks to what Jesus said and did, one of the words in this modern English translation is the same as in the original. A speaker of ancient Aramaic would recognize mammon.
The word was delivered unchanged from Aramaic to the Greek of the New Testament, from Greek to Latin, and eventually to English. Apparently there was nothing else in Greek, Latin, or English that would exactly translate mammon, which means "wealth as an object of desire and false worship." Its earliest English appearance is as wealth personified in William Langland's allegorical Piers Plowman of 1362. The character named Dobet (that is, "Do Better") does what Jesus urged: "with Mammon's money he has made himself friends, has turned to religion, has translated the Bible, and preaches to the people St. Paul's words."
Aramaic is both younger and older than its close relative Hebrew. In Jesus' time it was a modern language, compared to Hebrew, but unlike Hebrew it has not been revived after it died out more than a thousand years ago with the spread of Arabic-speaking Islam. Although no one speaks Aramaic nowadays, one descendant, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, is spoken by 30,000 people in Syria, another 30,000 in Iraq, and fully 80,000 in the United States, and another descendant, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, is spoken by more than 100,000 in Iraq and 70,000 in the United States.
A few other biblical and religious words in English also come from ancient Aramaic, including abbot (880) from abba meaning "father" and Pharisee (897), as well as the Jewish kaddish and tefillin (both 1613).