The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

154 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
alongside the prevailing -ayya,19 even in the same text, such as the
Tariff bilingual. For Palmyrene, this could be taken as representing
either a change in progress (from -ayya to -e ) or a vernacular form
(-e) breaking through a habit of historical spelling (-ayya). It cannot
be due to transmission error. The same is true of Onqelos and
Jonathan. Whether it is a change in progress (as I myself think) or a
vernacular form, it still separates Onqelos and Jonathan from the
Western dialects, where the form never existed. Tal makes a
Herculean effort to restrict these forms to collective nouns and thus to
link them to the Aramaic nisbe-ending (pp. 83-85). He may be right.
Even if he is, however, Onqelos and Jonathan is not 'saved' for
Palestine, since collective nouns there do not end in -e. In any case, his
theory is weakened by the presence of a good many plurals that cannot
be taken as collectives; these he has to interpret as copyist error.
In addition to these plurals, one also finds in Onqelos and Jonathan
occasional infinitives in the derived stems with the vocalism o-e: qattole
for the Pael, 'aqtole for the Aphel, etc. These infinitives are a
clear link to the east, since they are elsewhere found only in
Babylonian Talmudic Aramaic and in Mandaic, and one time in
Palmyrene. They occur more rarely than the plurals in -e, and also
allow an explanation as transmissional phenomena. Nevertheless, there
is that one occurrence in Palmyrene, where other infinitives of the
derived stems resemble the Syriac type with preformative mem and
sufformative -u. This suggests that in Middle Aramaic the infinitives
in the different dialects were in a state of flux. The normal infinitive
in Onqelos and Jonathan is like that of Official Aramaic, with a-a
vocalism, an inheritance also shared with Qumran Aramaic.
The phonological phenomenon I want to mention is the contraction
of the diphthong ay to a. In general I would prefer not to use phonological
criteria to place Onqelos and Jonathan's language dialectologically,
at least insofar as the phonology of the texts is expressed solely
in vowel points. One of the presuppositions of this study is that the
consonantal text is taken as fundamentally stable. The advantage of
this particular phonological process is that it has an effect on the consonantal
text. If the diphthong were there, it would be expressed by a
yodh.
19. Rosenthal, Sprache, pp. 76-77.