The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

KAUFMAN Dating the Language of the Palestinian Targums 125
exclusively a literary one—but a real dialect none the less. It is
virtually the same as the language found in the canonical Targums of
Job and the Psalter, and is related in many interesting ways to dialects
found in other medieval works such as the Tobit text published in
1878 by Neubauer. 19 The standard Aramaic dialect most closely
related to it is Syriac—whatever the historical implications of that
relationship may be. To be sure, many of its features are clearly
derived from the Palestinian tradition—such as the particle or>» for
Hebrew "o and the verb *on, 'to see', for example, but, in my opinion,
that is no reason to assume a Palestinian origin for any of the texts
written in this dialect. Lexemes from this dialect will be cited in the
CAL under the siglum LJLA—Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.
How, then, are all of these Jewish Aramaic texts and all of these
Jewish Aramaic dialects related? And is there any kind of methodological
control available that would enable us to justify our picture of
those interrelationships? To follow the old paths will not do, for the
old paths are founded on a premise no longer true—the premise that
all we have are the canonical texts. We must remember that the classical
conceptions of the history of the targumim developed in the nineteenth
century, and even the substantial changes occasioned by the discoveries
and initial publications of materials from the Cairo Geniza
were made in the pre-Qumran era. There was no firm foundation on
which to rest one's analyses.
I believe that now there is such a foundation—at least bits and
pieces of one. All of us who study and teach targumic literature are
used to the process of comparing parallel texts to the same passage. In
order to compare and evaluate those comparisons, however, we must
have a model in mind. If text A is dependent on text B in manner X,
what should text A look like? If then, we find A and we find B, we can
posit that relationship X obtains. Before now, however, there have not
really been any good models. Thanks to the publications from the
Genizah and to the release of the Qumran material, now there are. Let
us take a look at what they may teach us.
The appended Aramaic text material consists of three separate
sections of textual 'scores': 20 (A) Traditional Targums of Gen. 11.1-8,
19. A. Neubauer, The Book of Tobit: A Chaldee Text from a Unique Ms. in the
Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878).
20. All readings are those of the files of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon,
which variously have been derived from manuscript photographs, microfilms, and