Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/17455227-13110104

Aramaic Studies 11 (2013) 126

AramaicStudies

brill.com/arst

Targum Pseudo-Jonathanand Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

Stephen A. Kaufman*

Hebrew Union College Cincinnati, OH, USA

Translated by SethWard, Bernard Grossfeld and Paul V.M. Flesher

Edited by Paul V.M. Flesher

AbstractThe twentieth-centurys Targum manuscript discoveries made clear that if Neoti, the Frag-ment Targums, and the Cairo Geniza fragments were composed in Jewish Palestinian Ara-maic, thenTargumPseudo-Jonathanwas not. In this classic essay, originallywritten inHebrewin 19851986 and translated here for the rst time, Stephen Kaufman worked to describePseudo-Jonathans dialect. He found that it borrowed from other dialects, but merged theminto a single unieddialect appearingnot only inPseudo-Jonathan, but also in severalWritingsTargums.This essay thus presented the earliest description of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.

KeywordsAramaic; dialect; Late Aramaic; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan; Targum writings

In the nineteenth century, it was traditional for researchers of Jewish Aramaic to[363]divide Targum into three types, from the criterion of linguistic dialect:

1) Babylonianthat is to say, Targum Onqelos to the Torah (hereinafter TO)and Targum Jonathan to the Prophets;

2) YerushalmiThat is to say, Targum Jonathan to the Torah (generally de-scribed in research literature as Targum attributed to Jonathan, Targum

*This article was written while I was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies of theHebrew University, in a group organized by Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein (19851986). I am eternally thankful for the invitation to participate in this group. I wish to indicatemy great gratitude to the sta of the Institute for their constant readiness to assistme.This arti-cle originally appeared as Stephen (Shalom)A. Kaufman, TargumPseudo-Jonathan and LateJewish Literary Aramaic, in M. Bar-Asher et al. (eds.), Moshe Goshen-GottsteinIn Memo-riam (Studies in Bible and Exegesis, 3; Ramat Gan, Bar Ilan University Press, 1993), pp. 363382 (in Hebrew).] Pagination given here in square brackets refers to the original article.

2 Stephen A. Kaufman / Aramaic Studies 11 (2013) 126

Pseudo-Jonathan or YI, hereinafter PJ), the Fragmentary Targums (YII),Targum Job and Targum Psalms.

3) Amixed typeThat is to say, the Targums to the Five Megillot

Today, after the manuscripts of the original Yerushalmi Targum of the Torahhave been discovered (hereinafter TY: manuscript fragments from the CairoGeniza, and a complete manuscriptthe well-known Neoti manuscript fromthe Vatican Library), it is clear that even though the Targum known by the namePseudo-Jonathan includes signicant material from the tradition of the Landof Israel, it is not a Yerushalmi targum at all, but something of a mixture ofTO, the Yerushalmi Targum, and fragments of midrash from various sources.Moreover, it is not uniform from a linguistic point of view: it contains wordsand idioms from the Aramaic of the Yerushalmi Targum, from that of TO, fromBiblical Aramaic, and from the language of the Babylonian Talmud as well.In this light, M. Sokolo was right when he decided to exclude PJ from the

sources used in his new dictionary dedicated to the Jewish Aramaic of the Landof Israel.1 But there is a new lexicographical project in the eld of AramaictheCAL (The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon)2and for the purpose of den-ing the scope of this comprehensive dictionary, one must, from the inception,take into account all Jewish texts written in Aramaic, including Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.The question is this: Is it proper to cite from PJ in the dictionary, andif so, under what dialect of Aramaic would it be reasonable to put it?In order to answer these questions, and despite my feeling that the language

of PJ is nothing | but a complete mixture (and therefore not to be considered for[364]the purposes of the CAL), I have undertaken to study the characteristic featuresof its language in more fundamental way.Since PJ includes material taken both from TO and from TY, it is clear that

in order to get a correct impression about the language of the author of PJhimself, we must analyze only textual fragments that are not parallel to theseTargums. Therefore I went over the rst two parashot of Genesis, Exodus, andDeuteronomy, and isolated the places where the text of PJ diers from both TO

1) My thanks to Prof. Michael Sokolo for making it possible for me to review the enormousbodyofmaterial he gathered and edited for his dictionary [nowpublished asMichael Sokolo,ADictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan Uni-versity Press and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Second edition, 2002.]2) Thework of preparing the CAL was centralized at JohnHopkins University in Baltimore,MD, USA.Themain editors are D. Hillers, J.A. Fitzmyer and S.A. Kaufman, with the partic-ipation of an international committee of Aramaic scholars. [Ed. Shortly after the publicationof the original article, theCALmoved to theHebrewUnionCollege/Jewish Institute of Reli-gion in Cincinnati, OH, under the direction of Professor Kaufman.]

Stephen A. Kaufman / Aramaic Studies 11 (2013) 126 3

andTY in all its forms, evenwhen thedierence between themencompassedoneword only.3 I thus found about 700 words, about half in continuous texts, and Iwent over this corpus again, in order to discover the lexicographical character ofPJ.It is clear from the start that some drawbacks lie in this approach:

A. There may be some places (perhaps many places) where the text of PJ wastaken from a text of the Targum of the Land of Israel unknown to us.4

B. I did not try to discover whether word combinations in PJ lacking parallelsin TO or PT in that location were actually borrowed from another place inPJ, and in that place the combinations were taken from TO or TY.

C. I did not attempt to separate thematerial according to its aggadic source, thatis to say, I did not examine whether the author used Babylonian terms whenbringing a citation from a Babylonian source, but usedWestern dialect whentaking an aggada from a Palestinian source.

Despite these caveats, it seems to me the general picture is correct, and if it isnecessary to revise our conclusions, it will only be in minute details.This analysis resulted in a list of words may be divided into seven groups (for

the specic wordlists see the appendix to the essay):

1) General Aramaic: words known in most dialects and most periods of Ara-maic.

2) Jewish Literary Aramaic: words and/or forms known from the languages ofTO andTargum Jonathan to the Prophets, or from theAramaic texts discov-ered in the Qumran caves. These two dialectal sources (Targum and Qum-ran) reect the literary language in the Land of Israel in the last centuries ofthe Second Temple Period, and up to the year 200ce, more or less.5

3) Only onemanuscript of PJ has survived to our times. I used the new edition. E. Clarke et al.(eds.),TargumPseudo-Jonathan of the Pentateuch: Text and Concordance (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav,1984). Please note that the concordance should be used with great caution.4) Theknown texts areA.DiezMacho,Neophyti I, vols. 15 (Madrid-Barcelona:CSICPress,19681978); Fragment Targum: Michael L. Klein,The Fragment-Targums of the PentateuchAccording to the Extant Sources (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1980), and the Geniza frag-ments that Prof. Klein is about to publish.My thanks to him for enablingme to use his editionbefore it appeared in print. [Ed.The translation retains Hebrew terminology used in the orig-inal essay for this category of texts. Targum of the Land of Israel is equivalent to TargumYerushalmi and the Palestinian Targum.]5) [Editor: Referred to in recent scholarship and theCAL as Jewish LiteraryAramaic ( JLA).]


3) Jewish Aramaic of the Land of Israel: Words characteristic of the dialect ofthe Targum of the Land of Israel and/or of Galilean Aramaic (dialects of theJerusalem Talmud and the JerusalemMidrashim).6 |[365]

4) Babylonian Aramaic: words/forms/orthography borrowed from or inu-enced by the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud.

5) Hebrew: Hebrew forms or words imitating forms in sources written inHebrew (including words borrowed from Greek).

6) Archaic or obscure: It is known that our author often uses forms that imitatethe salient characteristics of Biblical Aramaic, in particular nasalization(adding a nun in place of a doubled consonant) and the haphel form inplace of the aphel, and also loves to invent forms which have an archaicavor.

7) Unique/Syriac: This is the most important list. (See below.)

In my comments on the lists, I noted justications for my analysis, as well as theforms attested in the corpus when there is more than one attested form for aword.What conclusions derive fromour analysis? At rst glance, it appears we face a

situation of complete chaosthat state which we expected to nd at the begin-ning. How can it be explained? Were we to consider PJ exclusively, even if wediscount the existence of list 7, perhaps we could suggest two explanations: (1)We have a late author, with a decient knowledge of Aramaic (more precisely,one with relatively good knowledge of the classic dialects, but lacking the abil-ity to distinguish between them, and lacking any spoken Aramaic dialect of hisown), or, (2) we are dealing with a pure Yerushalmi text (a sort of Yerushalmireworking of TO), that underwent all kinds of scribal adventures until it reachedits present state.And indeed, these two explanations are the ones usually accepted by Targum

scholarship at present. And from the point of view of many scholars, the samereasons even explain the state of the known manuscripts of the Targums of thebooks of theHagiographa. But the truth of thematter is that the Targums of theWritings are not part of the problem, but rather part of its solution! The otherpart of the solution we nd in our list 7.List 7 contains single words that occur, among Pentateuchal Targums, only in

PJ. But most of the words of the list are common to Targum Pseudo-Jonathanand to the Targums to the book of Job and the book of Psalms (and sometimesalso in other Targums of the Writings)and are not found in other Targums.

6) [Editor: Referred to in recent scholarship and the CAL as Jewish Palestinian Aramaic( JPA).]


An additional characteristic of list 7 is that many words are also known in Syriac(with small dierences, of course). This phenomenon spurred me to review allthe lists an second time from the point of view of the lexicon of the WritingsTargums, from which a very interesting fact emerged.Even thoughPJhas some characteristics of a source of theLandof Israel, others

of a Babylonian source, additional characteristics of Literary Aramaic, and oth-ers not characteristic of any of these dialects, almost all the characteristics in allthe groups (lists) are found also in language of the Yerushalmi Targums to theWritings. But our data demonstrates that what unies these Targums is not theirYerushalmi-ness but a unique, standard system of Yerushalmite characteris-tics, both lexical and grammatical. Furthermore, these common Yerushalmitecharacteristics are merely part of a larger group of features | that characterize the[366]literary dialect in which these Targums were writtenLate Jewish Literary Ara-maic (hereinafter, LJLA).I do not intend to claim that all these texts (i.e., TargumPseudo-Jonathan and

the Writings Targums), or even a single pair of them, were written or editedin the same place or the same century, and we cannot escape the conclusionthat every composition has unique characteristics that deviate from the nor-mative type we might have been able to delineate on the basis of the clearly-shared characteristics. But I am prepared to defend two basic conclusions, eachof which contradicts one of the fundamental conclusions of one of the majorschools of Targum scholarship: On the one hand, LJLA was a literary dialectused in an area in which Aramaic was still spoken, an area in which the tradi-tion of Aramaic literary dialects was still alive and kicking. When the languagedeviates from the ordinary (excluding archaisms, scribal corrections and hyper-corrections), it is possible to suppose that local dialects peek through the literaryscreen, just as we suppose with other literary dialects. On the other hand, thefact that these Targums are characterized by a standard, lengthy list of linguisticfeatures of the Aramaic of the Land of Israel does not prove that the Targumictraditions found in them are Yerushalmi. Nor does this prove that the home-land of even a single one of these texts is in the Land of Israel. The Yerushalmi-ness of these texts is merely a feature of the literary language we are examin-ing.Can it be that an Aramaic text, from a period in which Aramaic was still

spoken, would have articial forms and linguistic inventions such as we nd inPJ? Not in an early period, apparently, as long as the original exegetical-targumictradition was still felt. But PJ and the Writings Targums do not directly belongto this chain of tradition. They are something else, from another period (andfrom another place?). From the standpoint of the language they contain, theyare much more related to the later Jewish biblical targumsthe product of the


Academy and not the product of the Synagogueinwhich we nd a freedom oflanguage usage greatly similar to what we nd in PJ.7

Let us clarify, I acknowledge that here I propose to forego once and for all afoundational premise established by Prof. Y. Kutscher, zl. He argued, correctly,that the presence of characteristics from Babylonian Aramaic in a Jewish Ara-maic text does not prove that the source of that text is in the East. For, given thecentral position of the Babylonian Talmud in late scribal tradition (and, regard-ing TargumOnqelos and in Targum Jonathan to the Prophets, in the light of theBabylonian transmission of the texts), the later scribes often xed the text tomatch the known Babylonian typology. But I am no longer prepared to accepthis second claim, that is, that the presence of Aramaic traits of the Land of Israeldialect in a particular text could be explained solely by the Land of Israel originof that text. He used to say, Why would a scribe add Western characteristicsto a text whose origin was not in the West?8 I am not now prepared to arguethat characteristics like these were never indeed added even once, | but I suggest[367]that there is a block of texts connected to scriptureTargum Pseudo-Jonathan,Targums of the Writings and othersthat were composed from the start in anAramaic dialect that used certain specicWestern characteristics abundantly, butit is very likely these texts were not composed in the Land of Israel. So it is quiteproper to consider this question:Why did this literary dialect use these featuresof the language of the Land of Israel? I am not willing or able to give the decisiveanswer to this question now, but what I do wish to emphasize is that we can-not answer our question with the simple response: Their source is in the Landof Israel. In the meantime, it is possible to surmise that one of the reasons forusing Western characteristics is because in that period (between the sixth cen-tury and the ninth century?) and in that area (from the Land of Israel to cen-tral Syria and even further east) the Yerushalmi Targums to the Pentateuch werewell-known, and they served as archetype for writing in Jewish Literary Ara-maic.So what are the distinguishing characteristics of this Aramaic dialect, LJLA,

and which texts are written in it?We will not achieve a satisfactory answer with-out undertaking comprehensive research. For now, it is possible only to list a fewgeneral principles: apparently,most of thewords in lists 3, 7 and even4 are typicalof our dialect, especially ,,,,,,,,,,

7) See, for example, Yona Sabar, Sefer Bereshit be-Aramit hadasha (The Book of Genesis inNeo-Aramaic) ( Jerusalem: Magnus Press, 5743 [1983] (in Hebrew)), pp. 2535.8) But I tend to think that the Targum Yerushalmi to the Pentateuch is based on a sourceformulated in Literary Aramaic (that is, the same text that served as a basis for TO), thatunderwent afterwards a series of additions and changes that made it closer to the Westerndialect, and to the Yerushalmi system of doing Targum.


,,,, and . This is also true of many morphologies fromJewish Literary Aramaic in general and from Targums Onqelos and Jonathan inparticular. And nally, scriptural / Syriac archaizing such as and istypical of our dialect.Froma grammatical aspect it is very dicult to recognize the special character-

istics because of many corrections which have fallen into the manuscripts beforeus. But it is clear that the ending for masculine third person (for example, ,his hands) was typical of the dialect, and so also the use of pronominal suxesattached to a verb to indicate the object (in contrast to the Yerushalmi Targumsto the Pentateuch). In most cases the morphology is similar to that of TargumOnqelos. Additionally, it seems to me, that there are principles of usage in thisdialect, at least as used by the more talented authors who wrote in it, not foundin any other Jewish Aramaic dialect whatsoever. See, for example, the notes to

, (list 2), , (list 4), and (list 7).Likewise it is dicult to assemble a complete list of the written texts in this

newdialect, especially in light of the poor state of themanuscripts in our hands.For example, although the nature of the targums to the Five Megillot appearsquite dierent from that of PJ, Job and Psalms, apparently these were all writ-ten in this dialect (except, perhaps, the Second Targum to Esther, which appearsto me to be very late), and underwent further correction because of their usein the synagogue. And as for the Targumim that remained Yerushalmite, theyremained that way because they were not used at all in the Synagogue.9 Thesecorrections may be divided into two groups: those which mimic TO, and thosebased upon the language and orthography of the Babylonian Talmud. It is pos-sible to add to these Targums (merely as an initial suggestion): |[368]

A) Most of the Yerushalmi supplements (tosephtot) for Targum Jonathan ofthe Prophets.

B) Later compositions and translations such as the Book of Tobit and Bel andthe Dragon.10

C) Piyyutim and reshuyot (personal liturgical poems introducing a majorprayer) from medieval times, that is, written after the Land of Israel piyyu-tim of the Byzantine period, but earlier than the later compositions writtenin theWestern diaspora.

9) Targum Proverbs is known to be translated from Syriac, but the dialect of the Targum isthat of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic!10) Both of these are found in A. Neubauer, The Book of Tobit (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1878). There is no doubt that Bel and the Dragon is translated from Syriac, and apparentlyso is the Book of Tobit.


We must emphasize that it is very apparent that there are many texts (andamong them certainly some that appear on this list) that were not written inour dialect itself, but only after the period in which the dialect ourished.Theirsimilarity to the texts in our dialect teaches that they were inuenced by it justas our dialect was inuenced by the earlier Literary Aramaic.What is new in our explanation? A few scholars in the nineteenth century,

and even already in the sixteenth century, emphasized that there is a similaritybetween the Targum of the book of Job and the Targum of the book of Psalms,and that both of them are similar to Targum Yerushalmi (that is to say, PJ).Even in our own generation, several scholars who treated theTargums of selectedbooks of theWritings tended increasingly to emphasize the Land of Israel char-acter of these texts.11Our innovation lies in the conclusion that the Land of Israelfeatures of theTargums to the books of theWritings andPJ are not Land of Israelin the full meaning of the term. In other words they did not derive from an origi-nal Land of Israel tradition of the Targum of these biblical books.These featuresrepresent only one dimension, albeit a truly important and central one, of theLJLA: a dialect, in which dierent Aramaic traditions participate: Biblical Ara-maic, Jewish Literary Aramaic, Aramaic of the Yerushalmi Targums, Aramaic ofthe Babylonian Talmud, and a spoken Aramaic dialect very close to Syriac in itsforms (and also cognizant of the orthographic tradition of Syriac). All of thesetake their part, not in anarchy, but every one in a measured and normal manner.I doubt very much if it is possible to compare sections from Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Targum Job, Targum Psalms, and Targum Chronicles (of course, sec-tions lacking outside sources) and to argue that in one of them there are morewords or forms corresponding to the dialect of the Yerushalmi Targums to thePentateuch than in another.True, someusemore archaic formsor articial forms,and some make more use of Babylonian forms. In contrast to this, the Land ofIsrael character derives from a shared, circumscribed nucleus of Land of Israellexicographical and grammatical material (in addition to that part of the nucleusthat is not Land of Israel). None of these texts testies to a source within a liv-ing and ourishing tradition of spoken Aramaic of the Land of Israel, as do thevarious Pentateuchal Targums, neither in the form known to us today, nor evenin any | form we are able to reconstruct, if we thought the text underwent far-[369]reaching corrections by later scribes.

11) For example, RaphaelWeiss,TheAramaic Targum of Job (Tel Aviv:TheChaimRosenbergSchool for Jewish Studies, 5738 [1979]); and R.T.White, ALinguistic Analysis of the Targumto Chronicles with Specic Reference to its Relationship with Other Forms of Aramaic (Ph.D. dis-sertation, Oxford, 1981). The exaggerated dating suggested for PJ in this dissertation shouldnot be taken seriously.


A long road stands before scholars of Jewish Aramaic until they are able tosketch the full picture of this dialect. It is a fact that the single manuscript ofPseudo-Jonathan is an exceedingly poor manuscript. But we know of much bet-ter manuscript of the Targums of some books of the Writings, and I am certainthat the dialect reected in the best among them will emerge as very close to thestandard I have described here. I am likewise certain that research will determinethat there are a very few distinctly Babylonian forms in the reconstructed sourceof those texts. If so,wehave succeeded in resurrecting a lost and important dialectof JewishAramaic. Its lexicography deserves to stand alongside the other dialectsin CAL.

Postscript by Stephen A. Kaufman, October, 2013

This paper was written when the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project(CAL) was just a dream. Almost all the texts mentioned in the article are nowavailable for study online at the projects web site http://cal.huc.edu, and manyof its proposals and tentative conclusions should now be rened using the toolsfound there. A sample such study will be published in a subsequent issue of thisjournal from theMunich conference proceedings.The following remarks reecta quarter-centurys work with this data for the project. One thing that this workhas made crystal clear that was not emphasized enough in the original paper isthat the amount of scribal tampering and/or error reected in the known copiesof these texts was both substantial and widely varied. Especially in the case ofthe Syriac-like expressions distinctive to the LJLAdialect, later scribesliving innon-Aramaic-speaking milieuscould not possibly be expected to understandmost of them, and corruption is rampant.It should also be emphasized that Dr. E. Cook had actually started on his dis-

sertationwork atUCLAon the grammar of Pseudo-Jonathanbeforemy researchthat took place in the autumn of 1985.We reached very similar conclusions andhave since collaborated, but I did not have the opportunity to see his work untilafter my oral presentation. Nonetheless, I should have insisted that reference toit be included in the six-years delayed print publication. Lamentably, Dr. Cookhas yet to publish his complete ndings.

Specic Comments

p. 3 paragraph B). This procedure can and should be easily done now using theCAL. At the time of the original article the only concordance for these texts wasthe somewhat unreliable one for Pseudo-Jonathan referenced in fn. 3.


p. 7, 2nd full paragraph. The Second Targum to Esther. When I wrote thisimpression I was undoubtedly inuenced simply by the massive aggadic mate-rial in the text to suggest it was very late. Only with the study appearing in theforthcoming Munich paper did I learn that its base text in fact belongs, from alexicographic perspective, to the core of LJLA. Having gone through substan-tially more generations of scribal tampering, however, it gives a false impressionwhen compared with the other LJLA core material.

p. 7 bottom paragraph B) and fn. 10. I have no idea how I came up with the ideathat Tobit and Bel and the Dragon were translated from Syriac. It is now clearTobit was not at all from the Syriac, but was rather rendered from a European-language source in a non-Aramaic-speaking environment. (Consult my forth-comingMunich paper.) As for the additions to Daniel, the Bel and the Dragonmaterial published by Neubauer referenced in the article indeed shows unde-niable connection to the Syriac text where the portions are parallel and musthave been based on it.The text published byM. Gaster in Proceedings of the Soci-ety of Biblical Archaeology vol. 16 (Dec. 1894): 312. (which contains both thePrayer of theThree and Bel and theDragon), on the other hand, shows no suchsimilarities and is written in an Onqelos-type but simplistic Aramaic similar tothat of the medieval Tobit text and is thus strongly suggestive of a non-Aramaic-speaking milieu. As a demonstrative example, consult the passage at v. 27 of Beland the Dragon (CAL text number 62035) where the Syriac

correspondsword forword to theNeubauer text except for a few standard ortho-graphic dierences between Jewish Aramaic and Syriac scribal practice:

whereas the Gaster text is totally dierentcloser to the Greek texts but corre-sponding precisely to neither Greek recension:

In sum, the core texts of LJLA properly speaking are Targum Pseudo-Jonathanto the Pentateuch, Targum Psalms, Targum Job, and Targum Sheni, along with,perhaps, a few of the tosephtot to Targum Jonathan to the Prophets. (Whichones and precisely how much demands further research.) All other late texts areincluded in the general rubric of LJLA but must be understood to have widelyvaried origins as regard both place and time.

11 621 )3102( 11 seidutS ciamarA / namfuaK .A nehpetS

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2

3

4

5

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8

9

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21

22

23

|[371]24

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case)25

26

(then)27

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29

30

31

32

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(healthy)34

35

36

21) , .22) See in list 6.23) .24) .,,25) , ( is an error for and not an unusual orthography for the Babylonian form , even though this form is present in this manuscript).26) This is the correct and expected form. On rare occasions, the Babylonian form

)( is attested in PJ.27) Perhaps this should be transferred to List 2.28) The long form is characteristic of JLA and Galilean Aramaic; the short form is morecharacteristic of our dialect.29) , .30) .31) ,,,,,,, .32) , .33) ,,, .34) , .35) ,,, .36) (4) In contrast to only one occurrence of the classic form , as is generally the case inPJ. Its not clear tomewhich group thisword belongs to. Perhaps it is inuenced byBabyloniantraditions, but one may also suppose that it is a good form in late Literary Aramaic, or even


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621 )3102( 11 seidutS ciamarA / namfuaK .A nehpetS 41

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72

73

74

75

76

77

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79

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72) ,, .73) , .74) ,, .75) , .76) , .77) .78) , .79) .80) In Jewish Literary Aramaic and the Aramaic of the Targums of the Land of Israel, this iswritten as in all early dialects of Aramaic. ( appears only four times in Neoti). Despitewhat appears at rst glance, this is not a Babylonian form! It is the usual form in our dialect,which appears in about 90% of occurrences. Important testimony to its authenticity is givenin MS Paris 110 of T. Ecclesiastes, in which there are an abundance of Land of Israel forms,whereas the other testimonies use literary forms: MS 110 always uses , as opposed to inthe other MSS.81) See in List 4.82) ,, .


38

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101

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301

401

501

evixeer(601)nuonorp

701

801

)noom(

901

011

111

]573[|211

311

411

511

611

711

811

911

021

. )101. ,, )201. , )301. ,,,, )401. , )501. ,, )601. )701. )801. )901. , )011. )111.5 tsiL ni eeS )211.)2( )311. ,,,,,,,, )411. ,,, )511. )611. )711sebircs tuB .JPni tcerroc dna lausu si sa )2( ,nuonorp enilucsamnosrepdr3 eht htiW )811.4 tsiL ees () ot mrof eht detcerroc nefto osla. , )911.8:2 .neG !ciS )021


121

221

321

421

521

621

721

821

921

031

131

231

]673[|331431

531

631

731

. / )121. , )221. )321. ,, )421. , )521. , )621. , )721. )821. )921. , )031. ,, )131. )231. )331. ,,, )431. )531. ,, )631. )731


831

)stnemtrapmoc(931

041

141

241

341)lliw(

()441

541

,641

741

841

941

051

151

251

. )831.4 tsiL ni ees dna , ,,,,,,,, )931. ,,,,,,,, )041.)!nainolybaB ni( , )141. )241. , )341! )441. , )541. ,, )641. , )741. , )841.drow nretseWa spahreP )941. , )051


351

451

]773[|551

651

)dettimrep()sllewd(

751

851

951

061

161

,261

]873[|

. )151.)hkemas naht rehtar nis( ciahcra eht htiw nettirw syawla si siht ,JP nI )251. ,,,, )351. )451. )551. )651. ,,, )751. , )851. fo daetsni ,9:6 .tueD )951. , )061. )161. )261


2. Jewish Literary Aramaic

(to be late)163

(others)(another)164

(itsfundamentals)165

(woman)166

(youdelayed)

(oven),(in front

of, before)167

(sour,unripened)

(ock)168

(possessive)(lest)(this)(this)169

,!170

(today)(dened accusative

marker)

(like this)(compared to)(now)(from now)(to look at)171

(red)(because)(mouth)172

173

163) Deut. 1:6, , a mistake for ?164) Feminine!Here, amistake instead ofmasculine inDeut. 4:34, but inmost of PJ, it is usedcorrectly, compare T. Tos. to Gen. 4:8 ( JTSMS 605 26v).165) Note the orthography of the sux, as in TO.166) ,,. A most important form. Orthography with nun does not appearin TO or TN, but is normal in Qumran, in Ocial Aramaic and Syriac, and sometimes inthe Geniza fragments. There are exceptions (see ), but PJ mostly distinguishes carefullybetween the two forms: without nun in absolute and construct, and with nun when denedor with personal pronouns. Compare T. Tos. to Gen. 4:8 (Bod Heb c 74r) line 19, in which

and appear in the same line!167) Two examples of each form, parallel to the general situation in PJ. As is the case with

, PJ uses a literary form here which is not found in TO but is frequently found inQumran and more ancient Aramaic. In this case, the form is also found in BA.168) The ending in yod does not come from Babylonian Aramaic but is a salient feature ofLiterary Aramaicthe plural form of a collective noun. See A. Tal, The Language of theTargum of the Former Prophets and its Position within the Aramaic Dialects (in Hebrew), (TelAviv: Tel-Aviv University Press, 5735 [1975]), pp. 83-85.169) This form (in contradistinction to ) is mostly used only for in the original in anadverbial sensealready etc. ButDeut. 3:25 is an incorrect usage (compareTNmargin ).170) See Gustaf Dalman, Grammatik des jdisch-palstinischen Aramisch, (second edition,Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1905), p. 353.171) .172) (a mistake! This is the only time withoutmem in PJ.) ,, ;

correct?As is well-known

from Prof. Kutschers research, the form of this word in the West is . It remains to beinvestigated as to whether there are in fact PJ orthographies without vav in texts lacking aLand of Israel source.173) , .


(to deposit)(their cities)174

(to put)175

(its ame)(to tire)176

177|[379]

3. Jewish Aramaic of the Land of Israel

(blood)178

(also)179

(because)(son)180

(self-, reexivepronoun)181

(commandment)(of )(where)(I was),(like, as)182

,(when)183

184(they)(other)185

(to know)186

(to see)187

188(mountain)189

(to throw)190

174) Theplural form of (city) alternates freely in PJ between this literary form (TO) andthe form known from the Land of Israel. But see also Syriac .175) ,, .176) .177) ,,,,,, .178) , .179) This is the correct form, as it is in TN (and PJ) Gen. 28:12. Only in Gen. 5:3 usesthe possessive pronoun his with this word. occurs 12 times, whereas the Babylonianform (see List 4) is documented six times in PJ.180) One time, in contrast to six times for the normal form .181) ,,. The Syriac New Testament also uses instead of as is usualin Syriac.182) PJ often uses this divided orthography. TN has only . Apparently this is a literaryorthography, based, as it were, on the form in TO. On the other hand, the conjunction

)( is written as a single word some hundred times in contrast to only ten times for . In TN it is always ! I have no explanation.

183) See previous note.184) Most think this to be a Palestinian form, but it is found in Geniza fragments. In the lightof the nun in Syriac, it may perhaps be considered to be the normative form in Late JewishLiterary Aramaic. See below.185) .186) ,,,, .187) ,,,,,, .188) , . In the Geniza fragments, the form with doubled vav is found frequently

whereas in the construct case the double vowel has collapsed . There are manyforms in PJ that follow the path of these variations, although there are also many deviations.Its possible the original Galilean form became the normative form in this dialectboth as adened noun and in the construct casebut itmay be that the deviant forms are scribal errors.189) , .190) .


(inammation)(to advise)191

(honor)192

193

194

(before him)(sevenfold)(return)(repentance)|[380]

4. Babylonian Aramaic

(that,m.)(that, f.)195

(Majus)(fourteen)(ropes)(his seed)(learned)196

197(maid-servant)

(block)(now)(to return)198

199(weddingfeast)

(now)200

(sh)(canopy)(water)201

(skull)(fears)202(on)

191) .192) 4 times, and twice only , the late Galilean form.193) 3 times, correctly, = . For the corrupted forms, see List 4.194) In the case of a dened numeral, the sux is correct in Palestinian Aramaic (SeeDalman,Grammatik des jdisch-palstinischenAramisch, p. 129). But in the four occurrencesin our texts, this form comes with the independent plural form. Apparently such forms werelearned from phrases such as The Ten Commandments and were transferredmistakenly to other places.195) The forms and are identical to the regular personal pronouns in the BabylonianAramaic of theTalmud, but the usage is not the same.Here, the reference is to that onethatis, exactly as the parallel forms in Syriac and .196) Deut. 6:7 .197) .198) ,,. The root is occasionally found in good texts of Galilean Aramaic,but it is certain that it is always a case of scribal Babylonization of theWestern root .199) See also T. Tos. to 1Sam. 17:43.200) Only twice in PJ. Compare a Geniza text of T. Tos. T-S AS 69:1:5.201) The correct literary form for the waterthat is appears often in PJ. means itswaters in Galilean Aramaic, and appears three times in this meaning in our texts (see List 3).But it seems to me that thanks to the Babylonian and Galilean forms being identical, despitethe dierence in meaning, the authors (or scribes) of Late Literary Aramaic chose preciselythis form, because its meaning was clear to all Aramaic speakers.202) 12 times in our texts, 6 of them are clearly Babylonian forms instead of the expected ,and 6 are scribal errors, resulting from the correct Galilean form on it but it must be


(rises, stands)(seven)

(excommunica-tion)

(thirteen)

)?((both ofthem)203

(lower)204|[381]

5. Hebrew

205

(heating)206

207

208

209

210

emphasized that, as an inseparable part of the preposition , this form is documentedwith great frequency in the Targum of the Land of Israel also.203) This correction is found frequently in Jewish texts, even among the best of them. Abouthalf of the occurrences in PJ reect this error, and the forms and even occur,forms with the Biblical sux . But these forms with vav are the normal ones in TO/Jona-than also. Therefore it is very possible that they belong to a layer of Jewish Literary Aramaic.See Tal,The Language, p. 66.204) .205) Gen. 4:8. Only one other place in PJ, Deut. 32:31, apparently reecting a midrashicsource in Hebrew. But see Kutscher, Studies, p. 63.206) This understanding is based on midrashic parallels.207) = Pirqe deRabbi Eliezer, chapter 23.208) = .209) .210) ,, .


6. Archaic or Obscure

211

212(messengers)213

(BA)

(BA)(he will throw

it)214

(BA)

(BA)(around)215

216(ood)(to suer)217|[382]

7. Special / Syriac

(magician)218

219(fatal drug)(between, among)(wings)

(place))((thus, how)220

(thus)(these)(planners)

(shame)(what!)221

(reprimand)(since)222

(from therst)223

211) Obscure. SeeWerner Philipp, EineNotiz zumTargum Jonathan, Jdische Literaturblatt,5 (1876), p. 19.212) In Literary Aramaic and Syriac . Thus ayin replacing aleph is an innovation. Com-pare the usual form frog parallel to the usual formwith even though in this secondexample, the ayin is justied etymologically!213) Likely borrowed from BA, but compare the orthography in Syriac.214) The dalet is a hypercorrection. In every other Aramaic dialect the rst root letter is zayin.215) An articial forman amalgamation of from Literary Aramaic with the parallelLand of Israel root .216) once, but this is a mistake. The word is frequent in Late Jewish Literary Aramaic,the result of a false archaization of the parallel form in Syriac andLiteraryAramaic (fromthe root in Syriac). It is as if it derives from the root .217) . Apparently an articial archaization of the Palestinian root in analogy to thewell-known root in the Land of Israel . But it is likely this is a spoken-dialect form! Noteits use in Tos. MS T-S AS 69.11 line 6.218) .219) .220) Galilean Aramaic has / (see in Christian Palestinian Aramaic), meaninghow. Perhaps the usage here is an amalgamation of two forms: thusLiterary Aramaic

, and how.221) Deut. 5:21.222) , . In general, PJ distinguishes between two formsalways lacking thealeph for the independent form, andwith the alephbefore personal pronouns, as inBabylonianAramaic. But in Babylonian, the independent form is .223) is found in Samaritan and Mandaic, in the Targums of Psalms and Job, and inAramaic logograms in Persian (see Dr. Mashkour,TheHuzvaresh Dictionary (Tehran: TehranUniversity, 1968), p. 172) and even in the Neo-Aramaic of the Jews of Kurdistan (see Sabar,Genesis, p. 164).


(to stone)(blows)(your wages)(blow)(to look at)224

(assembly)(panic)(detectives)225

(echoes, bat qol[pl.])226

(satchels)227

(fate)(blush)228

(mixture)(side)229

(areas)230

231

(to ask)232

233(to send)(their paths)(its nest)(one third)

224) ,. In literary, Galilean and Syriac Aramaic this words meaning is to hope.The meaning to look at is characteristic of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.225) Unique.226) Deut. 5:5. This occurs only one more time in Jewish Aramaic, in T. Job, 4:16, where italso occurs as . Compare Syriac and/or Greek .227) Unique. But compare the Talmudic .228) .229) Alternates with the better-known Literary form . also appears in SamaritanAramaic, but since it is lacking in Galilean Aramaic, I include it here and not in List 3.230) Syriac, Babylonian, and Targum Job.231) .232) , . Most scholars think this is a Babylonian form, but in truth it appears toa certain extent in all the late dialects. Therefore I place it here, as it is late Aramaic, and notexactly Babylonian Aramaic.233) .,,,, .

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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

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