More on the Absence of an Aramaic Bible at Qumran: A Response to Jack Poirier’s “The Qumran Targum of Job as a Window into Second Temple Judaism: A Response to Randall Buth”

I appreciate this opportunity to return to some issues concerning the Targum of Job that I raised in “Where Is the Aramaic Bible at Qumran? Scripture Use in the Land of Israel” and to evaluate Jack Poirier’s response entitled, “The Qumran Targum of Job as a Window into Second Temple Judaism: A Response to Randall Buth.”

I will summarize briefly the main points in my original article:

An Aramaic Targum of Job was widely known in Jewish circles during the Second Temple period—there are two different copies at Qumran, two rabbinic stories connected with the Gamaliel family that mention a Targum of Job, and a bibliographic reference to an Aramaic account at the end of the old Greek translation of Job. That is remarkably wide attestation. Just as remarkable, there is no evidence, other than these copies of the Targum of Job, that an Aramaic Bible was in use before A.D. 70. I suggested several possible explanations for this paradox, and concluded that an Aramaic Bible, if it existed at all, was most probably not in general use in the land of Israel during the Second Temple period. Lacking an Aramaic Bible, it appears that the Hebrew Bible was the Bible in use for the majority of persons in the land during the first century.

Poirier’s response was definite, yet curiously indirect. “Finding myself at odds with his [Buth’s] conclusions…I would like to suggest a different reading of the evidence….” However, identifying his reading is difficult. Poirier’s main argument would appear to rest on his statement, “I only want to note that there is more than one way to interpret the evidence.” We agree on this; however, the question is not whether or not there exists a plurality of interpretations of the evidence, but which reading best corresponds to the evidence.

Apparently, Poirier argued that Qumran should not be expected to have an Aramaic Bible:

If the Qumran community was as averse to clothing its religiosity in Aramaic as recent scholarship has argued, then it would be wrong to draw a negative conclusion about the use of Aramaic beyond Qumran based on what we find (and do not find) at Qumran…. The fact that a number of Aramaic texts were found at Qumran does not substantially alter this picture, except that we are then forced to say that the Qumranites did not look upon Aramaic as religiously evil per se, but only as an inadequacy for true piety and communion with God.

• ^[1] The choice of Hebrew as a written language does not appear to set the Qumran community apart from other streams of Jewish society. However, the style and kind of Hebrew at Qumran appears to be different. The scribes of Qumran wrote in a natural continuation of Late Biblical Hebrew (Second Temple Biblical Hebrew), but in a dialect that appears to be consciously cleansed from Greek loanwords. Notice that in their desire to write in a high style, they did not return to a First Temple Hebrew style. The Pharisees apparently chose a colloquial dialect of Hebrew for their oral law and the practice was continued when this oral law was collected and written down in the Mishnah, about A.D. 220. Mishnaic Hebrew was noticeably distinct from the "high" literary dialect. If Ben Sira is representative of the Sadducees, then even they were using a literary Hebrew for some of their writings. The Sadducees were also the probable recipients of a "proto-Mishnaic Hebrew" letter, 4QMMT. Even within the Jewish-Christian movement, the evidence for Semitisms in the Gospels points to narrative document(s) in Hebrew rather than Aramaic. (See note 3 below.) ↩
• ^[2] Discussion of the vernacular languages is not relevant here. My article does not deal with the complex question of the vernacular languages in use in the land of Israel in the Second Temple period. ↩
• ^[3] Please note, I am not suggesting that any of the four Gospels were written in a Semitic language. In all probability, they were written in Greek, and their immediate sources were Greek. On the other hand, because of internal linguistic evidence, I cannot attribute the highly Hebraic narrative style in Mark and Luke to some kind of artificial, holy style. The muted Hebraisms interspersed into the Gospel of Luke's uneven Greek are not its author's. Luke was partially smoothing out Hebraisms, not adding them. See my forthcoming article with Brian Kvasnica, "The Parable of the Vineyard, the Tenants and the Son" [JP—now published as Randall Buth and Brian Kvasnica, "Temple Authorities and Tithe-Evasion: The Linguistic Background and Impact of the Parable of the Vineyard, the Tenants and the Son," in Jesus' Last Week: Jerusalem Studies in the Synoptic Gospels Volume 1 (eds. R. Steven Notley, Marc Turnage, and Brian Becker; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 53-80.] A blatant element in translation Greek that separates Hebrew narrative style from Second Temple-period Aramaic narrative style is outlined in my article, "Edayin-tote, Anatomy of a Semitism in Jewish Greek," Maarav 5-6 (1990): 33-48. For a popular presentation of the article, see my, "Matthew's Aramaic Glue," Jerusalem Perspective 28 (Sept./Oct. 1990): 10-12. ↩
• ^[4] Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ 81; Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001). ↩
• ^[5] One of Bar-Ilan's works is available on the web: "Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries C.E." Certainly there was only a small minority of reliable public readers of the Hebrew Bible in the first-century synagogue, but reading the Hebrew Scriptures in public is a skill far beyond basic literacy. It requires a knowledge of pre-Masoretic Hebrew traditions. ↩
• ^[6] Hezser even attributes Rabin and Kutscher's views to a "majority," a majority view that does not yet seem to have penetrated New Testament scholarship. Both Rabin and Kutscher viewed the Judean villages as the natural home of spoken Hebrew. The Second Temple use of written Hebrew dialects is another matter, and should be beyond controversy. However, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that many writers still assume only two languages, Aramaic and Greek, were available to members of the first-century, Jewish-Christian movement. ↩
• ^[7] This conclusion accords with what we find in tannaic and amoraic sources. Early rabbinic midrashim, for example, Mechilta, are almost wholly Hebrew and based on the Hebrew Bible. Later midrashim, such as Genesis Rabbah, begin to insert Aramaic stories into the Hebrew base text and commentary. The Aramaic Bible became a storehouse for exegetical traditions and attained a place of special mention. ↩