Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

Just as Hebrew has dialects - Classical Hebrew in 1-4 Reigns, a Temple dialect around Nehemiah and Chronicles - so does the translation of Hebrew into Aramaic. I've been looking into a term for "the poor", meskinë in Syriac. The word recurs in the Aramaic Psalter for the Jews. Edward Cook found that this Psalter shares its not-Syriac with PseudoJonathan, Job, and Chronicles; more-recently Targum Sheni. Also found is that the Psalter depends on the Midrash... but not the reverse.

Hence the L in LJLA. This means that, where Christians often translated the Psalter into their vernaculars, Jews seemed less interested in Aramaic. Jews absolutely did translate their Psalter into Greek; I will not be shocked to hear if they also did Old Latin. But for Aramaic, Jews did not create a canon Psalter until mediaeval times; the Syriac Christians beat them to it, like the Copts beat them to it up the Nile.

We can allow some ad-hoc renditions were done, but nobody quoted them. This all reminds me painfully of the Psalter in Arabic.

I suspect the whole Late Jewish Literary Aramaic project be a reaction to Syriac. LJLA would be an artificial language. Unlike Syriac, Palaestinian was never a strong Christian language; so a Palaestinian basis would work well for Jews stuck around Galilee and Lebanon, and the Nile Delta. Why not; nobody was using it.

That might, further, explain how the Aramaic Proverbs looks like a clumsy and mechanical Peshitta.

BACKDATE 12/16