Is Aquila the Proselyte identical with Onqelos the Proselyte? Certainly, Palestinian traditions once woven around the figure of Aquila the Proselyte are applied to Onqelos the Proselyte in the Babylonian context. The name Onqelos is nothing but an Aramaized version of Aquila, as one would expect with the transition from the Greek-speaking environment of Palestine to the Aramaic-speaking environment of Babylonia. Yet the translatio of Aquila's person to the Babylonian cultural context involved much more than a linguistic shift and amounted to a transculturation which first developed in the Palestinian reception of the narratives surrounding his persona. The rich and living culture of these stories was passed on to Babylonia where a different process took over. Selecting a few traits from the received tradition, the Babylonian Onqelos was shaped to make important new points, some of which are unthinkable in the Palestinian context. Aquila's existence at one point may not be in doubt, yet his historical character is already elusive in the early Palestinian sources, whilst the multi-faceted Babylonian version of Onqelos can only be considered as myth. The astonishingly different reception which this famous proselyte met in Babylonia will concern us here.

The startling portraits of Aquila/Onqelos in rabbinic literature might as well suggest that they refer to more than one person bearing this name, with or without the appellative ‘the proselyte’, were it not for obvious connections between these portraits.

Over seven centuries, Roman Palestine staged Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew as Jewish languages besides several minority languages such as Nabataean, Phoenician, Latin, Arabic, Armenian and Georgian. The pre-Roman intersection of administrative and cultural languages with local vernaculars would remain characteristic for the Ancient Near East in general and Roman Palestine in particular. While the Romans used Latin for internal official communication throughout their empire, they did not impose their own language upon any of their subjects but published their imperial decrees in Greek, the new lingua franca in the Eastern part of the Empire where hardly any province was monolingual.

The multilingual context is manifestly relevant for the rabbinic views on the uses of language in Jewish society and influenced early rabbinic thought, as we have already had occasion to see. First, the rabbis accorded each language a meaningful place in the family of languages, subsumed under Hebrew as the mother of all languages, with acute relevance for the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Second, the rabbis considered the notion of the holy tongue a prerequisite for a surprisingly limited number of rituals, although over time the idea gained prominence whilst the positive appreciation of non-Hebrew languages, as well as the use of phonetic etymologies, would dissipate (later midrashim repeat earlier instances but do not create new ones).