The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

148 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
Aramaic period is characterized not by a koine, but by the breakup of
a koine, that is, Official Aramaic. Although the detailed review of
individual grammatical features and lexemes retains its value, Tal's
study is ultimately unconvincing.
This brief review of the recent discussion shows, I believe, that the
arguments for the Western provenance of Onqelos and Jonathan, insofar
as they are founded on language, are quite weak. Does that mean,
then, that the Eastern view wins by default? Not necessarily. The
second fundamental linguistic datum mentioned above—the fact that
the language of Onqelos and Jonathan is not the same as the bestknown
Eastern dialects—still has to be reckoned with. This fact above
all is the one that has made linguists so ready to find virtue in a
'Western' theory.
The problem of Onqelos and Jonathan's language has suffered for
years—for more than a century—from a tendency, perhaps unconscious,
to divide the Aramaic dialects between two poles, Eastern and
Western. Part of this may reflect the division of rabbinic academies
into the Babylonian and the Palestinian. There is the Babylonian
Talmud and then there is the Palestinian Talmud. There is a
Palestinian Targum and there is, apparently, a Babylonian Targum—
unless that Targum is also a Palestinian Targum. One could hardly
guess, reading the literature on the subject, that any Jewish life or
letters existed between Tiberias and Baghdad.
Imagine, however, a triangle on a map of the Middle East with
Damascus, Edessa, and Assur at the corners. Within that triangle
would be found, in the period 200 BCE-200 CE, a clear majority of all
speakers of Aramaic, as well as the important urban centers of
Palmyra, Dura Europas, and Adiabene, besides the three cities just
mentioned. Remember that this triangle encloses the ancestral home of
Aramaic, with all its diversity. Remember also that the two Aramaic
dialects most difficult to fit into an East-West dichotomy, namely
Syriac and Palmyrene, are found therein. The irresistible implication
is that the traditional dialectological division is far too simple. There
is a vast area of Syria and upper Mesopotamia whose Aramaic dialects
cannot be accomodated into an East/West scheme. For lack of a better
term, let us call these dialects 'Central Aramaic'.
It is true that Syriac is generally considered an 'Eastern dialect',
because it falls on the Eastern side of the classic isoglosses (l/n as the
prefix of the 3rd person impf. instead of v, e instead of ayya as theA