The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

144 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
order to make the Targums sound formal and impressive, and perhaps to
make them intelligible to both East and West. 3
In terms of our basic data, Ginsberg saw Number 1, the Eastern
elements, as due to Eastern origin, and Number 2, the non-Eastern
foundation, as Official Aramaic. Ginsberg's formulation was to be
highly influential as recently as the late sixties and Klaus Beyer's
earlier opinions. 4
The discovery of Aramaic texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls made
Aramaicists re-think many of these conclusions. Kutscher linked the
Genesis Apocryphon (IQGenAp), an undeniably Western text, with
Targum Onqelos and said that 'the vocabulary of the scroll seems to
clinch the matter of favor of... a Palestinian and perhaps even Judaean
origin for T.O.' 5 In view of the great influence of this pronouncement
in subsequent studies, it is interesting to note how slender is the evidence
Kutscher put forward to support it. There are five vocabulary
items: 'nph' (in the meaning 'nose'): 'ns byth 'men of the household';
'ry 'for, because'; hit' 'valley'; 'kly (Aph'el of &/y) in the meaning
'cry out'. There are also three grammatical features: the 3rd fern. pi.
perfect, the 2nd masc. sing, perfect ending -ta, and the 3rd fern. sing,
pronominal suffix -ha. 6 Of the five lexemes, the most important one,
'ry, is based on a faulty reading: all occurrences should be read 'rw.
3. H.L. Ginsberg, 'Aramaic Dialect Problems', AJSL 50 (1933), p. 6.
4. K. Beyer, 'Der reichsaramaische Einschlag in der altesten syrischen
Literatur', ZDMG 116 (1967), p. 253.1 have to disagree here with the late Moshe
Goshen-Gottstein, whose review of the literature I am following here to some extent.
In speaking of this period, he says, 'It should be admitted...that if the Proto-Onqelos
was composed in a standardized idiom that by definition was dialectically unmarked,
all earlier definitions of the language of TO were left dangling in the air. The basis for
labeling the language "Eastern" or "Western" had disappeared, but nobody quite
seemed to have noticed' ('The Language of Targum Onkelos and the Model of
Literary Diglossia in Aramaic', JNES 37 [1978], p. 171). This seems to me
inaccurate, at least for the '30s. Ginsberg, at least, and the others discussing the
problems, were not thinking in terms of Proto-Onqelos, but of Onqelos pure and
simple. The two language elements Ginsberg saw in Onqelos were the 'neutral'
Official Aramaic and the definite 'marked' Easternisms. The second element gives the
place of origin. Ginsberg's contribution was to explain the non-Eastern element as
unmarked for locality, rather than as Western, as Dalman and Noldeke had done.
5. E.Y. Kutscher, 'The Language of the Genesis Apocryphon', Scripta
Hierosolymitana 4 (1958), p. 10.
6. Kutscher, 'Language', pp. 10-11.