experience, that little children used to call their fathers ’abba’. When I started this study, which occupied me for quite a few years, I thought that it was just this babbling sound that Jesus adopted. But soon I noticed that this conclusion was too rash, for it overlooked the fact that already in pre-Christian times this word, which surely originated from the idiom of the small child, had vastly extended its range of meaning in Palestinian Aramaic. ’Abba’ supplanted the older form ’abi as an address