The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

120 The Aramaic Bible: Tar gums in their Historical Context
title a most useful volume one suspects even for those who would
question whether the Palestinian Targum should be dated to the
Byzantine Period, 11 and a complete Key-Word-In-Context concordance
to Neophyti (by lexical lemma, including marginalia) will be
delivered to the press shortly. 12 Most recently, the heretofore unpublished
Qumran Aramaic documents have become available—available
to all for the price of photographs, while some are just reaching us in
published form.
So, with all these new resources is there a consensus? Will there be
a consensus? What is or will be such a consensus? Should there be
such a consensus? Or do we risk mistaking silence and complacency
for consensus?
Permit me to review for you briefly the current situation as I see it
regarding the three major Targums.
The Palestinian
Diez Macho himself, along with the students he guided—primarily in
the lengthy studies and summaries prefaced to the individual volumes
of the Neophyti publication—was the foremost voice for the antiquity
of the Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch. It was, he argued over
and over again, pre-Christian—contemporary, at least in its origin,
with the Aramaic parabiblical texts from Qumran, the difference
being that the Qumran texts were written in formal, literary Aramaic,
while the Palestinian Targum was a popular and hence non-literary
text. Meanwhile, those who approached the Palestinian Targum from
a more linguistic perspective tended to date it to Amoraic times.
I think this dating is based on two considerations. First the language
of the Palestinian texts was seen to be very close to so-called Galilean
Aramaic, that is the language of the Palestinian Talmud and
Midrashim. Now the language of the Palestinian Targum is similar to
Galilean Aramaic in many ways, but it is by no means the same, and
11. M. Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine
Period (Dictionaries of Talmud, Midrash and Targum 2; Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan
University Press, 1990).
12. To be published in the series Publications of The Comprehensive Aramaic
Lexicon Project, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, by S.A. Kaufman,
M. Sokoloff, and E.M. Cook.