Abstract
A significant contribution of the Qumran Aramaic texts to the study of Aramaic has been the clarification it forced in our ideas of Aramaic dialectology. This chapter argues that the new data provided by the Aramaic texts from Qumran and elsewhere in the Judean Desert cannot be accommodated by simply refining old models of Aramaic dialectology. It discusses the need to replace Aramaic texts with new multi-dimensional models to account for the variability now evident in our corpora. There are probably around half a dozen dimensions required in a model that can account for all the Middle Aramaic data from Palestine, but three are explored. The chapter begins with two examples of the impact geography can have, then turns to one syntactic phenomenon which may be a function of a text's genre, and finally offers a brief comment on the role of linguistic ideologies in dialectology. Keywords:Aramaic dialectology; geography; Hebrew; linguistic ideologies; Palestine; Qumran Aramaic texts
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