The inscriptions he is reading is a much older form of Arabic than what's in the Quran. These date to somewhere between 300 BC and 300 AD roughly

This Arabic that you heard here is centuries older than Quran, totally different kind of Arabic. Arabic history or language didn't start from Islam or the jahiliya era, it's way older than that.

Tajik is a form of Persian. In its written form it's basically literary Persian written Cyrillic. Writing system aside, the differences from other kinds of literary Persian are trivial.

@@a.z.foreman74 oh yeah. I hear "stan" and immediately think 'Turkic'

Am I sure? No I am not. As far as I'm concerned it's kind of undecided. For me it's really *the* biggest open question about the phonology of Hebrew and Aramaic in this period. All the arguments any which way have plausible responses. You can say ejectivity doesn't spread, and so things like נִּצְטַדָּק suggests pharyngealization, but apart from the fact that in the Bible this is the only case of such assimilation, evidence from Caucasian languages shows that ejectivity *can* spread in precisely this way. It's just not all that common. The evidence of changing spellings in Aramaic is vulnerable to the same objections, and even if you grant that it is evidence for pharyngealization in Aramaic, you can't necessarily apply that to Hebrew in a straightforward, since (if the relative chronology of vowels is any indication) fullblown phonological convergence of Aramaic and Hebrew may not ever have *fully* happened while Hebrew as still a vernacular. I'm inclined to think that the total (or perhaps only near-total) lack of lowering in Tiberian Hebrew implies that pharyngealization in that reading tradition was not particularly old, but there are good objections there, too. If anything I'd put myself in that minority camp that thinks simple deaspiration of the emphatics (thus producing a convergence with Levantine Greek) is more likely (this is the plain literal meaning of what Jerome's account of emphatics says), with real pharyngealization being a later development, though when that happened would be yet another question. If deaspiration happened, it could well be quite late. I didn't do that here because I'm not too sure about that and I'd definitely be pushing a minority position. But yeah, a decision one way or another on the nature of the emphatics is one of a few assumptions I simply had to take on board. Another is the timing of pre-tonic lengthening which could really have happened at any time between proto-Hebrew stage and the Hellenistic period. I could well be wrong. You pays your money and you takes your chances.