that already during this period there existed dialectal variations. This standard literary idiom attested as the language of the papyri of the Jewish colony of Elephantine (5th cent.), that of some chapters of Ezra (4.8–6.18; 7.12–26) and Daniel (2.4–7.28), lived on down to the turn of the Christian era, for it is basically this form of Aramaic that we find in some literary writings from the Judaean Desert and the Targum Onkelos. (1) Cf. J.-B. Chabot, Les langues et les littératures araméennes (Paris,