The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

COOK The Language of Onqelos and Jonathan 143
crucial points and that they do not warrant the conclusions usually
drawn from them. I also want to propose a new perspective on the
language of Onqelos and Jonathan.
First, a few words on the history of the discussion, as far as it
touches upon linguistic issues. Two facts are admitted by all parties:
(1) that Onqelos and Jonathan, whatever their origin, had their final
redaction in the East and bear a number of linguistic traces of this
redaction; and (2) that, despite these Easternisms, the language as a
whole is not much like the Eastern Aramaic known from the
Babylonian Talmud or from Mandaic. Any theory of Onqelos/
Jonathan's language must accommodate these data.
The early attempts to solve the problem relied on crude sociolinguistic
models that would allow two dialects to share the same
space. Geiger, for instance, who believed in the Eastern origin of
Onqelos, asserted that the language of the Targum was a
Vulga'rdialekt, while the language of the Babylonian Talmud was a literary
dialect. Dalman, on the other hand, claimed that the language of
Onqelos was a Western Kunstsprache, while the language of the
Palestinian Talmud and midrashim represented the spoken vernacular
of the West. 2 Obviously, such models—which allowed one to ignore
similarities and differences between different Aramaic dialects—were
flexible enough to fit almost any preconceived idea about where the
Targumim might have originated.
The first few decades of the century saw a great increase in the
knowledge of the Aramaic dialects of the first millennium BCE, primarily
due to the papyrus discoveries at Elephantine but also to the
steadily increasing number of inscriptions from Syria. The recognition
of the phenomenon of 'Official Aramaic' gave scholars their first
look at a real standardized Aramaic dialect instead of a hypothetical
one. H.L. Ginsberg was the first to exploit this insight in terms of the
language of Onqelos:
[T]he Targum of 'Onkelos to the Pentateuch, and the Targums to the
prophets, of whose final redaction in Babylonia there can be no doubt,
exhibit, so far as I can see, only Babylonian dialect traits. Those features
in them which are ordinarily pointed to as Levant [Western] Aramaic are
not peculiar to this branch but common to it and the language of the chancellories
[Official Aramiac]... They were no doubt deliberately chosen in
2. G. Dalman, Grammatik des Jiidisch-Palastinischen Aramaisch (Darmstadt,
1981 [1927]), p. 13.