The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

122 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
the colloquial. All the evidence from the Near East, from ancient
times to modern, is consistent on this point. Letters, graffiti, and lecture
notes from the academy can be in the colloquial; sacred and semisacred
literature cannot.
This leads us to the second consideration in favor of late dating: if
the Palestinian Targum is in a kind of formal Palestinian Aramaic and
both Qumran Aramaic and the language of Onqelos/Jonathan are also
formal Palestinian dialects, then how do we squeeze them all into the
limited available time frame?
But just what is the time frame that we are talking about? I think
that most Aramaists today would assert that Qumran represents literary
Aramaic of roughly the turn of the millennium. According to the
growing consensus, the primitive basic texts of both Targums Onqelos
and Jonathan of the Prophets are supposed to come from Palestine and
from the second century CE. Since both of these dialects are obviously
earlier than the dialect of the Palestinian Targum from a linguistictypological
view (even Dfez Macho would acknowledge that), such an
approach pretty much leaves us with the third century, at the earliest,
for the Palestinian Targum tradition. To confirm such a view, though,
we are first obliged to ascertain just how valid, really, are these
accepted assessments of the date of Qumran and the dating and place
of origin of Onqelos/Jonathan?
In point of fact, Qumranists have been dating their texts earlier and
earlier with great abandon in recent years. Even the nearly sacrosanct
paleographic datings stemming from the work of P.M. Cross may
seem to have been pushed to the background as scholars rush to assert
that the document at the focus of their particular interest was composed
in the second, third, or even late fourth century BCE, however
late the script of the copies of that document recovered from Qumran
may be. The arguments are intricate and, usually, highly circular,
and, lamentably, the Aramaic texts have by no means escaped the fate
that has befallen their more numerous Hebrew fellows. An examination
of most of these arguments more often than not discovers a chain
of reasoning whose underpinnings run something like this: minor
fragments such and such from cave such and such are in such and such
a script that Cross has dated to the such and such quarter of the such
and such century, so obviously our text is earlier than that; moreover,
our text is clearly quoted in text such and such, which itself is dated
early by another series of intricate arguments involving the same kind