The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

COOK The Language of Onqelos and Jonathan 147
especially the sharings with Syriac, he attributed to the koine, while
the former were interpreted as signs of Western provenance. There
seems to be no good reason why he should not have done the opposite:
attribute the Eastern words to the point of origin and the Western to
the koine. In other words, once you start attributing features or
lexemes to a supraregional language, you have forfeited any ground
for assigning provenance at all.
Furthermore, Tal's koine model fails the crucial test of attestation.
If Onqelos and Jonathan are written in a standard dialect that represents
a deregionalized compromise between several related dialects,
that is, a koine, 11 we have to ask, where are the other texts written in
this koine'] None of the dialects presumed to be contemporaneous with
Onqelos and Jonathan, such as Palmyrene, Nabatean, Hatran, early
Syriac, or letters or contracts from the Dead Sea area, are written in
this koine. This 'common language' does not seem to have been very
common! 12
The fact is, the language situation for 'Middle Aramaic'—the
Aramaic dialects of the period 200 BCE-200 CE—is best described as
a dialect continuum, as I have recently argued. 13 From Nabatean in
the West, to Qumran Aramaic, Palmyrene, early Syriac, and Hatran in
the East, key morphological features fail to converge in any strong
cluster of isoglosses to mark a strong dialect boundary. The Middle
11. For a discussion of the concept of koine, see H.H. Hock, Principles of
Historical Linguistics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 485-91.
12. D. Boyarin, 'An Inquiry into the Formation of the Middle Aramaic Dialects',
in Yoel Arbeitman and A. Bomhard (eds.), Bono Homini Donum: Essays in
Historical Linguistics in Memory of J. Alexander Kerns (Amsterdam: Benjamins,
1981), p. 639, offers three criticisms of Tal. The first is that 'there is no reason to
assume the existence of an Aramaic koine at any time'; this resembles my second
point above. Second, he states that Tal's koine model 'does not explain adequately
the very data for which it was proffered, to wit, innovations shared by Syriac with
Palestine and not with Babylonia...[A pan-Aramaic koine] would by definition have
included Babylonian as well'. This resembles my first point, but I think Boyarin
misconstrues Tal slightly here. Tal does not use his koine model to explain
innovations shared by Syriac and Jonathan, but rather the vocabulary shared by the
dialects. His third criticism is based on the isoglosses discussed in his article, which
I will not discuss here.
13. E.M. Cook, 'Qumran Aramaic and Aramaic Dialectology', in T. Muraoka
(ed.), Studies in Qumran Aramaic (Supplements to Abr-Nahrain 3; Louvain: Peelers,
1992), pp. 1-21.