The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

124 The Aramaic Bible: Tar gums in their Historical Context
Qumran Aramaic becomes more and more troubling as we learn more
about the variety in the types of Qumran Aramaic and more about
variation in targumic manuscripts.
It may be, then, that a possible solution to our problem of limited
time frame is to remove Onqelos from the Palestinian mix. A discussion
of one point of view on some of these issues will be presented to
us by Dr Cook later in the conference. So let us move on.
Pseudo-Jonathan
Careless writers have long mistakenly labeled Targum Pseudo-
Jonathan of the Pentateuch a Palestinian Targum, while more careful
but even more egregiously misled scholars have frequently argued
that Pseudo-Jonathan was the earliest and, hence, most Palestinian of
all Targums, at least in some early textual incarnation. Most workers
in the field, though, have recognized the composite nature of that document—a
kind of compote of Onqelos, the Palestinian Targum,
midrashim, and even the Babylonian Targum, a compote in terms of
both language and content; a document, therefore, post-talmudic in
date at the very earliest, in spite of the presence of admittedly early
traditions within it.
From a linguistic point of view, the text seems at first blush to be a
hopeless mess—biblical Aramaic forms on the one extreme,
Babylonian talmudic ones on the other. In the mid 1980s, however,
order began to emerge from this chaos. Two studies, a brief one of
mine 17 and a dissertation prepared by Edward M. Cook at UCLA (to
be published soon, I hope, in the CAL monograph series), 18 reached
independent but very similar conclusions: In those passages wherein
Pseudo-Jonathan is not simply copying Onqelos and its language or
the Palestinian Targum and its language, or lifting a phrase straight
out of one of its midrashic sources, it does have its own distinctive
language—its own grammar and its own lexicon. This language
must be considered to be an authentic Aramaic dialect—undoubtedly
17. First presented to the seminar group on Targumic Studies at the Institute for
Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in 1985, it has now been 'in press' for
seven years. I hope it will be published before too long in the planned M. Goshen-
Gottstein memorial volume.
18. E.M. Cook, 'Revising the Bible: The Text and Language of the Pseudo-
Jonathan Targum' (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986).