The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

COOK The Language of Onqelos and Jonathan 149
masc. pi. emphatic, loss of emphatic force of -a, elimination of nbearing
suffixes in the imperfect indicative). 14 However, there is no
reason to isolate these four features (actually three, since the first and
fourth are due to the same levelling process) as crucial. There are
other isoglosses, such as the preformative mem on the derived-stem
infinitives, that bind Syriac to the Western dialects. Daniel Boyarin
mentions three more: the masculine singular possessive suffix of masculine
plural nouns (-why instead of -yh), the 3rd person plural forms
of the perfect, and the n-bearing forms of the perfect. 15 I think
Boyarin is wrong on the last one, but the point is made: Syriac is
neither an Eastern dialect, nor a Western dialect. (Tal also recognizes
this possibility.) Given the geographical location of Syriac, that is
precisely what we would expect.
Palmyrene presents similar problems. There we also find the masc.
sing, suffix on masc. pi. nouns as -why, the y- prefix on the imperfect
indicative, the m-preformative on derived stem infinitives, alongside
occasional emphatic plurals in -e, a derived-stem infinitive of the
'aqtole pattern, and certain Eastern-Syriac lexemes, like mtwl. It
would not be accurate to describe Palmyrene as either Eastern or
Western, although it is closer to the Western dialects than Syriac.
The best way to make sense of all this information is simply to propose
a dialect continuum, which I have tried to describe elsewhere.
The Aramaic of Palestine, represented by Qumran Aramaic, would
shade off by degrees into a dialect like Palmyrene, which in turn
overlaps with Syriac, which grades off imperceptibly into Hatran and
similar dialects, which are connected to the lower Mesopotamian
dialects of Mandaic and Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic. In such a
context the terms 'Eastern' and 'Western' can be used only to refer to
the extremes of the continuum, as indeed they have been. But my
'Central Aramaic' category captures, I believe, the insight that there
were dialects in the middle. How many we don't know, since over
time the predominance of Edessene, that is, Syriac, for literary purposes
probably tended to mask real dialect distinctions.
It will be obvious by now that I propose to place the language of
Targum Onqelos and Jonathan in this large 'Central Aramaic' group.
14. H.L. Ginsberg, 'Aramaic Studies Today', JAOS 62 (1942), p. 234.
15. Boyarin, 'Formation', pp. 613-49.