[Avodah] Targumim from Sinai

[Yitzhak Grossman]

On Tue, 26 May 2009 12:15:00 -0400
Zev Sero <zev at sero.name> wrote:

> T613K at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > I would like further clarification on this point, too, but this is
> > what I think it means:  not that the actual Aramaic words used by
> > Onkelos were given on Sinai together with the Torah [who even spoke
> > Aramaic back then?
> 
> Everybody.  At least, everybody who was educated, or who engaged in
> international trade.  It was the English of its day.

According to Wikipedia:

"There are inscriptions that evidence the earliest use of the language,
dating from the tenth century BCE. These inscriptions are mostly
diplomatic documents between Aramaean city-states.  The orthography of
Aramaic at this early period seems to be based on Phoenician, and there
is a unity in the written language. It seems that, in time, a more
refined orthography, suited to the needs of the language, began to
develop from this in the eastern regions of Aram. Oddly, the dominance
of Assyrian Empire of Tiglath-Pileser III over Aram in the middle of
the eighth century led to the establishment of Aramaic as a lingua
franca.

>From 700 BCE, the language began to spread in all directions, but lost
much of its homogeneity. Different dialects emerged in Mesopotamia,
Babylonia, the Levant and Egypt. However, the Akkadian-influenced
Aramaic of Assyria, and then Babylon, started to come to the fore. As
described in 2 Kings 18:26, Hezekiah, king of Judah, negotiates with
Assyrian ambassadors in Aramaic so that the common people would not
understand. Around 600 BCE, Adon, a Canaanite king, used Aramaic to
write to the Egyptian Pharaoh."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic#Old_Aramaic

So it does not really appear to have been a lingua franca in the era of
Matan Torah.

Yitzhak
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