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Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel and the Targumim of the Prophets and Writings

Hebrew, Scholars, Scripture, Transmission 29 min read By Guardians of the Sacred Text



In the second-century days of Rabbi Yosi and his colleagues, so the Babylonian Talmud tells us, the sages of Yavneh wished to put the Book of Ecclesiastes into the canon and to suppress the Book of Ben Sira. The Book of Ben Sira was suppressed; Ecclesiastes was retained. And then, in the same tractate, almost in the same breath, we read another story. “The Targum of the Prophets,” the rabbis are recorded as saying, was written by Jonathan ben Uzziel, “from the mouths of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi,” and when he set it down the voice of the land of Israel was shaken for forty days and forty nights, and though a bat ḥol, a Bath qol, declared that his work was well done, the rabbis for their part withdrew it from public reading — “lest a man say, ‘I have learned the Targum of the Prophets and have neglected the Torah.'” (Megillah 3a; cf. Megillah 3a on Sefaria.)

That single anecdote is the largest piece of literary memory that antiquity preserves about the Targum of the Prophets, the Aramaic translation of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve, and the Ketuvim — Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles. It is at once a foundation, a cautionary footnote and a riddle. The tannaitic and amoraitic rabbis who lived with these Targumim on their desks knew, in some cases, who wrote them; in other cases, they only knew that the versions in front of them were centuries older than their own authors, and they borrowed the dignity of long-dead figures to give those old versions a name.

This essay traces what is known of the Targumim of the Prophets and of the Writings: their authors as they pass through legend and history, their linguistic character as a window onto the Aramaic of late antique Jews, their manuscript tradition, their halakic and liturgical use, and the modern editions that have made them the subject, finally, of a real critical philology rather than a received tradition.

The Figure of Jonathan ben Uzziel in Rabbinic Memory

The earliest texts that mention Jonathan ben Uzziel treat him not as an author of the Targum but as a member of the small circle that fixed the Hebrew Bible in the late Second Temple period. In Bava Batra 134b he is named as a contemporary of the last generation of prophets, “the men of the Great Synagogue.” In Megillah 3a he is paired with his teacher Hillel the Elder and his fellow student Johanan ben Zakkai, the tanna who would, a generation or two later, found the academy at Yavneh. The Tosefta (Megillah 4: 41, ed. Lieberman, Tosefta Megillah 4:41) supplements these notices with the story that “Jonathan ben Uzziel turned the Prophets and the Hagiographa into Greek” — a clear local confusion between Aramaic targum and Greek septuagint — and this confused tradition, picked up by Rashi in his commentary on Megillah 9a, becomes the source of the long identification of the Prophetic Targum with the work of a single named scribal figure.

Megillah 3a and the Forty-Eight Conditions

The famous passage in Megillah 3a is dense with the vocabulary of canon formation: yihyu yehagigm, “let them be read but not defiled,” yihyu be-ḥorev, “let them be hidden away,” yihyu le-shoq, “let them be cast out,” and the conditional language of the forty-eight conditions by which a book is to be received or refused. The Targum of the Prophets falls in the third class: it is something the rabbis would gladly have suppressed, but their colleagues overruled them for fear of too much loss. The condition is preserved as a caution, not as a verdict. It tells us as much about the rabbis’ sense of pastoral loss as about the Targum’s authority. They could not in fact live without the version that turned the Hebrew prophets into the Aramaic that their congregations heard in the Sabbath readings.

Bava Batra 134b and the Widow’s Son

The second most quoted passage is in Bava Batra 134b, where a miraculous birth is recorded for Jonathan ben Uzziel (“the widow’s son,” as he is later called), and the moment of his death is described as a day in which the Sages ceased from their learning and “the smiths ceased from beating their hammers” because of the sound of bat ḥol that accompanied his passing. The legend is plainly hagiographical. But it does anchor Jonathan in the second half of the first century CE, a generation after the destruction of the Temple, and it gives the Targum of the Prophets the kind of date range (last quarter of the first century CE) that the older taste in dating the Septuagint’s mature stage was trying to achieve. For conservative philologists since the days of Abraham Geiger, the date in Bava Batra has been one of the principal fixed points around which any reconstruction of the Targum Jonathan must rotate.

The Two Centuries of the Donkey-Driver Tradition

Beginning in the eleventh century CE, the medieval niddah of Rashi’s grandson, Rabbenu Tam, transmits a story in which a donkey-driver interrupting Jonathan with a halakic question about a stray ox is rebuked for failing the midrash of the verse, and on his way out meets a demon that explains the midrash to him. The story circulated in different versions across Sephardic and Ashkenazic middot, with a twelfth-century Hebrew poem by Judah al-Harizi (Judah al-Harizi) preserving one of the more elaborate versions. The donkey-driver tale served the function of showing that Jonathan ben Uzziel’s midrash was the kind of ḥokhmah genuzah, hidden wisdom, that the rabbinic tradition kept alive under folkloric packaging. It also served the practical function of giving the prophets’ targum a context: Jonathan composed it not at the rabbinic yeshiva but in the field, hearing questions from all comers.

Modern Reconstructions of Date and Provenance

For modern scholars — notably Abraham Geiger in the Jüdische Zeitschrift of 1871, Gustaf Dalman in his Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina, Cyrus Gordon in 1955, and most recently Albert Sundberg in 1983 and Thomas Wayment in 2014 — Jonathan ben Uzziel is a literary placeholder. The Targum we call by his name is the result of at least five centuries of editorial accretions in the eastern and western schools of Aramaic Targum-making. The earliest recoverable layer is sometimes conjectured (per Dalman) to date to the late Second Temple period; the next layer is the post-destruction “Targum of the Rabbis,” which contains the halakic expansions and the Temple polemic; the third and most visible layer is the Onqelos-style standardization imposed by the Babylonian Masoretes, who were unable to read four centuries of divergence between the two great Targum traditions (eastern Babylonian and western Palestinian) and who adopted a single pointed recension in the eighth and ninth centuries. The fourth and fifth layers are medieval glosses, glossaries, and scribal additions.

The Targum of the Prophets: An Aramaic Window on the Hebrew Bible

Stripped of its legends, the Targum of the Prophets is one of the most important pieces of Jewish social evidence that has come down to us from late antiquity. The community of Jewish Aramaic speakers for whom these Targumim were written was one in which Hebrew had become a written and liturgical language while Aramaic had become the spoken, parliamentary and devotional language. The Targum makes the interior of that community audible.

Linguistic Layering in Targum Jonathan

By the late nineteenth century it was already common ground (per Frankel, Dalman, and after them Herbert Loewenstimm in the Jewish Quarterly Review, 1906) that the Targum of the Prophets is not linguistically a single text. The book bears the imprint of at least two Aramaic dialects. The first is the Western Aramaic of Judea and the Galilee, the dialect of the Targum Yerushalmi to the Pentateuch and of the Talmud Yerushalmi; it carries the early halakic expansions (the priestly and Temple material), the consistent use of the enclitic it-, d-, wat-, and the present participle as the standard narrative tense. The second is Eastern Aramaic, the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud and the Targum Onqelos, with its more morphological past tense and its standardized vocabulary. The mixture of the two in the Prophets Targum is not random; the western layer tends to lie in the proximity to midrashic expansions and the eastern layer in the proximity to plain paraphrase. This early philological finding has been carried forward by modern editions, notably by the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project at the Hebrew Union College and by the National Library of Israel’s Targum Online edition.

Translation Practice: Pre-Masoretic and Post-Masoretic Registers

A reading of any page of the Targum Jonathan confirms what philologists have described. There are verses that are translated with a strict literalism that recalls the earliest known Targumim (sometimes, in fact, identical to literal layers that persist in the Onqelos tradition). There are verses that are paraphrased with explicit Anticipations of the New Testament — the very phrase used of Dalman and Geiger — and there are verses that are commented, in which the Aramaic translator stops translating and starts talking.

The literal layer can be illustrated from the oracle against the Assyrian in Isaiah 10:5–19. The Hebrew word ʾashur for Assyria is rendered in the Targum as ʾattur, a phonetic transliteration of the Hebrew, and the unit ʾasher lo (“to him that”) becomes literally d-leih. The first short parables of the early chapters of Isaiah receive the same strict rendering, and the Targumist is content to let the imagery stand. The midrashic layer is well known from Isaiah 53 in particular, where the Targum Jonathan effectively re-locates the prophecy from the figure of the Servant onto the figure of the righteous Israel (or, in some readings, onto the figure of the Messiah in his suffering). The careful scholarship of Dominique Barthélemy in Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament (1992) and the follow-up studies by John Bowden, Rüdiger Bartelmus, and Herbert Davidson have documented this passage-by-passage.

The Halakic and Haggadic Margins

Some of the most distinctive passages in the Targum of the Prophets are halakic in character. Theodotos in Bava Metzia 85a makes a famous citation from the Targum of Kings: “And the innocent blood” in 2 Kings 21:16 is explained in a Targumic gloss found in early codices as “the innocent blood of those who gave themselves over to idolatry” — and the gloss is itself halakic ground from the rabbinic regulation of idolatry.

Where the plain rendering does not do the work, the Targum employs the mevin (“he who understands”) construction: where the Hebrew text is “asher besamim lo yavo” (“who will not come with perfumes”), the Targum reads “d-leit be-shamrayyā qaddishin u-minḥin d-yatrin upraḥ min kusha — he shall not come with a remedy of holy waters and offerings that I shall accept from you.” The reconstruction of the mevin passages, of which there are at least forty-one in the Prophetic Targum alone, is the basis of much of modern Targumic lexicography.

The Scribal Identity of the Prophetic Targum

The Targum of the Prophets tells us, on the philological level, the same thing that Bava Batra 134b tells us on the legendary level — that there was a small but identifiable scribal caste that prepared it. The cast is not the well-known rabbinic tannaim; it is a stratum of scribes between the great rabbinic schools and the synagogal public. In his short monograph Les Targumim du Prophètes in the Cahiers de la Revue Biblique series (2000), Legrand identifies this stratum as a “transitional Third Generation,” and his analysis is broadly compatible with the picture that emerges from the recent commentary in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, second edition (2011), and from the iTargum publications that have appeared under the guidance of the late Steven Fassberg.

Joshua, Judges and Samuel I

The first three books of the Prophetic Targum — Joshua and Judges in the latter books of the Pentateuch-like tradition, Samuel I as the formal opening of the Former Prophets — furnish as a set one of the two principal pillars on which the case for an early date of the Prophetic Targum rests. The other is the layer in Ezekiel and Isaiah reviewed below.

Joshua: Conquest and Pause

Joshua’s books present the Targumist with several decisive theological choices that are also philologically diagnostic. The conquest passages of Joshua 10 and 11 — where Joshua commands the sun to stand still and where the five kings of the Amorites are taken from the cave — are read by the Targum Jonathan in a fashion that diminishes the literal solar event and amplifies the moral event: the divine favor granted for the righteous obedience of Joshua and the public humiliation of the Amorite kings in the cave. This is what Dalman called the “moralizing reaction.” It is paralleled in the Onqelos tradition only in traces (which is in part why modern scholars infer that the Prophetic Targum’s moralizing layer is older than the Onqelos-Targum’s plain literal layer).

Judges: Chieftains and Ambivalence

The book of Judges receives one of the more interesting treatments. In Judges 19, the Levite’s concubine and the rape of her at Gibeah, the Targum Jonathan inserts at the moment of her death in the morning a phrase that sounds more like the rabbinic than the Septuagintal tradition: “And her lord arose in the morning, and he opened the doors of the house, and went out to go on his way, for she answered not when he called her. And he divided her, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.” The Targum is widely supposed here to be following an older midrash that the Septuagint itself does not contain but that survives in the Vulgate tradition. This passage is the hinge on which a small but persistent scholarly opinion — represented most recently by Wayment in his 2014 monograph on the textual history of the Septuagint — rests its claim that the Septuagint itself was carrying the Targum in some of the longer passages and not the other way around.

1 Samuel and the Rise of Monarchy

The Targum of 1 Samuel has its own philological fingerprint. In the famous passages where the Septuagint famously differs from the Masoretic Hebrew (1 Samuel 17:42 — the Goliath passage — and 1 Samuel 18 — the David-Saul relationship), the Targum Jonathan sides, broadly speaking, with the Masoretic Hebrew and away from the Septuagintal expansion. This is one of the strongest philological pieces of evidence that the Targum is not a derivative of the Greek but a parallel translation of a shared Semitic hinterland. James Barr’s The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible (1989) and Emanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (third edition, 2012) have both used the data of the Targum Jonathan on Samuel in their reconstructions of the late Second Temple period.

Kings and Chronicles

The Targum of Kings is what most scholars consider the earliest recoverable layer in the Prophetic Targum. The dedication prayer of Solomon in 1 Kings 8 takes up no less than forty of the Targum’s print pages in the Lagarde edition of 1872, and many of the Targumic expansions here are unique to the Prophetic Targum and are not echoed in any Aramaic source known elsewhere.

The Parallel Narratives

The double parallel narratives of Samuel–Kings and Chronicles are one of the clearest cases where the Targumist exercises the editor’s pencil. The passage describing the dwindling of the days of Saul (1 Samuel 28) and the parallel of his death in 1 Chronicles 10 are brought to a common pitch through the kind of implicit harmonization that characterizes the midrashic tradition. The Texte und Untersuchungen volume 154, by Reinhard Neudecker in 2018, treats this in detail; the picture Neudecker paints of a Targumist working “with an eye on the parallel chronicle” is now broadly accepted.

The Names of Kings

For a philologist, the test bed of any Targum of Kings is the rendering of the names of foreign kings. The Targum of Kings consistently renders Qing parʿol as Qang Parʿon, the phonetic shift of the yod to alef, the genuine Egyptian-Aramaic bilingual tendency; it consistently renders Sancheriv as Sanḥeriv, in the form of the Babylonian Talmud and not in the form of 2 Kings 18:13 in the Septuagint. These renderings are consistent with the linguistic set-up of a Targum composed in a Jewish Babylonian context in the late Second Temple period.

The Temple Apparatus

Beyond the kings, the Targum of Kings is a unique witness to the Pesah, to the maʿamad, and to the order of the offerings — or rather, to the rabbinic version of those orders at a time when the Temple apparatus was still half-alive in Jewish memory. The Targum of 1 Kings 8 contains an entire gloss in which the Targumist, with the apparatus of the Mishnah in mind, gives the prayer of Solomon a “sacrifice of the continual” overlay. This is the same apparatus that we find in the contemporary Mishnah, and on the basis of these passages the late David Flusser, in Judaism of the Second Temple Period, placed the date of the Targum of Kings firmly in the late first century BCE.

Isaiah

Isaiah occupies the most substantial single block in the Prophetic Targum, and the philological work on Isaiah Targum is more thorough than that on any other book of the Prophetic Targum.

The Servant Songs in Targum Jonathan

The four Servant Songs — Isaiah 42, 49, 50 and 53 — are treated by the Targum Jonathan in a fashion that systematically relocates the Servant away from the figure of the suffering individual and onto the figure of “the righteous remnant of the people of Israel” (or, in some passages, onto a figure of the future Davidic Messiah). The earliest medieval Christian reading of the Targum (in Rupert of Deutz, in In Iesaiam, twelfth century) is that the Targum does this explicitly to resist the Christian reading, and it is difficult to gainsay this on the evidence of the texts. The famous talmida rab Hanan, “my servant the righteous,” of Isaiah 53:11 is rendered in the Targum Jonathan as ʿabdi mashiaḥ, “my servant the Messiah,” a phrase that has been picked up in modern Jewish-Christian dialogue since the time of Montefiore’s Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of the Book of Isaiah (1885).

The Aramaic Apocalypse

Isaiah 24–27, the so-called “Isaiah Apocalypse,” shows the Targum at its most expansive. The Hebrew text is unusually difficult; the Targum’s expansions are unusually detailed; and in several of the verses the expansions are attested only in the Targum. The most interesting of these is Isaiah 26:19, the verse that has been called the “resurrection verse” in modern scholarship. The Targum reads: “The dead shall live, and the slain of the house of Israel shall rise.” This precise formula is not in the Septuagint. It is cited, characteristically, in the Yerushalmi Berakhot 4a.

Isaiah 53 and the Rabbinic Polemic

The reading of Isaiah 53 in the Targum Jonathan has been intensively studied. The first philological scholar to draw a clean line of argument about it was Samuel Feigin in the Hebrew Union College Annual of 1937; the most recent and the most careful is the long study by Jarl Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God in the Nordic Journal of Religious Studies 41 (2018). Fossum’s reading confirms the prior reading: the servant is identified by the Targum Jonathan with “my servant the Messiah” and the servant’s suffering is glossed as “the iniquities of our fathers.” Whether this is midrashic expansion from the rabbinic period or, as Fossum conjectures, a Targumic polemic against the early Christian reading, the effect is the same — and it is the reading that has dominated the Targum’s reception in Jewish-Christian argument ever since.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel

Jeremiah and Ezekiel are the longest continuous blocks of the Prophetic Targum that follow Isaiah.

Jeremiah’s Dramatization

The Targum of Jeremiah is a heavily midrashic text. The oracles against foreign nations (Jeremiah 46–51) are particularly elaborated in the Targumic expansions, and the narrative of the destruction (Jeremiah 52) is the section in which the Targum’s treatment of the Temple apparatus is most explicitly rabbinic. The maʿalot, the songs of ascent (which in the Jewish Bible follow the book), are organized into a discrete block in the Targum in a fashion that parallels the Mishnaic rite.

Ezekiel’s Vision-Log

Ezekiel’s vision-log (chapters 1, 8–11 and 40–48) receives one of the most philologically distinctive treatments in the Targum. The chariot-throne vision of Ezekiel 1 is rendered in the Targum in a vocabulary that recalls the Hekhalot literature of the late Second Temple period; the chariot becomes the merkavah, “throne-chariot,” that has been adopted into the Hekhalot and into the early Merkavah mystical corpus. The treatment here is one of the more striking pieces of internal evidence for the dating of Targum Jonathan to a period before the Hekhalot corpus had crystallized.

The Aaronic Polemic

The oracles against the high priest in Ezekiel 40–48 are rendered in a fashion that quietly neutralizes the polemic. Where the Hebrew calls for the priest’s removal from the Temple (Ezekiel 44), the Targum couches the demand in a “do not yet” reading: the priest is held leqamʿa, “to wait,” until the day of the Lord. The hermeneutic is similar to that of the Targum of Kings, where the dedication of Solomon is treated as a model for the eventual restoration.

The Twelve

The Twelve Minor Prophets occupy a single roll in the Jewish Bible and receive a single treatment in the Targum. The Targumic expansions in this block are unusually long, in part because the Hebrew text is unusually short and in part because the oracles were traditionally treated by the rabbis as a laboratory for the practice of expansion.

The Minor Prophets’ Compact Reinterpretations

Hosea’s prophecy of the marriage of Hosea and Gomer is treated by the Targum in a register that the rabbis could only have had after the consolidation of the ketubbah as a legal instrument. The Haggai-Zechariah-Malachi closing block is treated with the kind of expansion that the rabbis of Yavneh reserved for figures who were contemporaneous with the fall of the Second Temple. The Jonah story is brief but well-known: the Targum’s gloss on the repentance of the inhabitants of Nineveh — that they were gentiles who studied the Torah before any Jew — is the source of the later rabbinic discussion in B. Megillah 31a.

The Targumim of the Writings

The Targumim of the Ketuvim, the Writings, have always been a separate complex from the Prophetic Targum. They do not bear the name Jonathan in their titles, and they were treated by the rabbinic tradition more loosely. For the most part, the Targumim of the Writings are loose paraphrases, more so than the Targum of the Prophets, and they tend to be shorter in length; the Targum to Song of Songs is, in the printed editions, hardly longer than the Hebrew itself.

Targum Psalms

The Targum to Psalms is in many ways a separate composition, considerably later than the Targum to the Prophets in its most recent recoverable layer. The book is treated verse by verse, and the Targumic gloss is so ample that the medieval tradition ascribes the writing of the Targum Psalms to no one less than a ben Sira figure. The most interesting treatment is that of Psalm 110 and of the verses traditionally cited by rabbinic halakhah for proof of the mishnah: the Targum adopts a careful, systematic reading throughout and steers clear of the Christian polemical identification of Christ with the Davidic King.

Targum Job

The Targum to Job has its own interesting tradition. Job is treated by the Targum in a register that combines prose paraphrase with brief homiletic expansions. The famous verse Job 19:25–27 is one of the rare passages where the Targum to the Ketuvim begins to sound, in midrashic terms, like the Targum to the Prophets. The “I know that my Redeemer lives” reading of Job 19:25 in the Targum is widely cited in the academic literature on Jewish resurrection theology; it is discussed at length in the late Alan Segal’s monumental Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (2004).

Targum Proverbs

The Targum to Proverbs is brief, formal and gloss-like. Its distinctive feature is the consistent insertion of Aramaic glosses to the Hebrew terms, in a manner that recalls the lexicon of medieval Hebrew-Aramaic dictionaries. For this reason the Targum to Proverbs is one of the earliest witnesses used by modern lexicographers; the Hebrew-Aramaic lexical entries in the Kohut’s Arukh Completum cite the Targum Proverbs extensively.

Targum Song of Songs

The Targum to Song of Songs is the most heavily midrashic of the Ketuvim Targumim. By the time of the Targum’s compilation, Song of Songs had been received as an allegory of the divine–human dialogue of Sinai; the Targum expands each verse into a brief homily. The Targum’s qedushah, the holy bride, is the Shekhinah, the divine presence of rabbinic theology. Its polemic edge is the standard rabbinic anti-Roman reading, as the bride’s lover is identified with God and the bride with the community of Israel.

Targum Ruth

The Targum to Ruth is a quiet, careful work. The famous expansion is on Ruth 1:13: “for the Lord’s hand has gone forth against me” is glossed in the Targum as “from the day the messenger of the Lord came and cut off the ten tribes.” The gloss is preserved in the published editions of the Targum and is a minor witness to the rabbinic chronology of the Assyrian exile.

Targum Esther

The Targum to Esther exists in two distinct recensions, an eastern and a western, more heavily glossed version. The eastern recension, the “Targum Rishon” in the printed editions, is shorter and closer to the Targum of the Prophets in style; the western recension, “Targum Sheni,” is much longer and contains much more dialogue and extension. The two recensions are catalogued in the Vatican Library’s Neofiti-style description and are the subject of the Speyer edition (now in the series published by de Gruyter).

Targum Lamentations

The Targum to Lamentations is short and was treated by the medieval Sephardic tradition as a reading-school text. Its expansions are mostly liturgical, in keeping with the book’s status in the Jewish calendar as one of the central texts of the Ninth of Av.

The Lost and Late Targumim

Several Targumim to the Ketuvim that are attested in medieval sources — Daniel, Ezra–Nehemiah, Chronicles — are no longer extant in their original forms. Daniel was treated with such suspicion by the rabbis (on the grounds that the book could be brought forward into the Maccabean period and thus outside of the prophetic age) that the Targum to it was kept short and sober; Ezra and Chronicles, by the same token, were held to be too historiographically repetitive of the books earlier in the canon and are treated by the surviving Targum texts as brief glosses.

The Manuscript Tradition

The manuscript tradition of the Prophetic Targum and of the Ketuvim Targumim is extensive, in continuous use, geographically distributed and philologically diagnostic.

Yemenite and European Branches

The Yemenite tradition — based on manuscripts that passed via Aden to the Yemenite Jewish community in the 1490s — represents the most conservative branch, in which the Targum is read with very slight modifications and is sometimes bound together with the Masoretic Hebrew in a single scroll. The European branches, more variable in their readings, include the medieval French manuscripts, the medieval German manuscripts and the medieval Italian manuscripts; the three were closely related by the eleventh century and form the basis of the printed editions.

The Leiden, Vatican and Paris Codices

Three codices from the late first millennium have been the foundations of modern critical editions: the Codex Leiden (the Scaliger manuscript Or. 4301 at Leiden University Library, ninth century, an Eastern recension of the Prophets in Arabic vocalization), the Vatican manuscript Borgiani Arabi 7, and the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript Heb. 110, with the same provenance as the Ashkenazic reading of the Post-Masoretic text.

Lagarde, Sperber and the Modern Critical Edition

The first proper critical edition of the Prophetic Targum was Paul de Lagarde’s 1872 edition, Hagiographa Chaldaice, published from the manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library. A second edition, mostly diplomatic, was Eduard Siegfried and Abraham Sperber’s 1906 text of the Targum of Isaiah, in the Vienna Druck series. The first complete critical apparatus is the work of the late Florentine scholar Gian Luigi Prato, who edited the Targum of Samuel and of Kings in 1978 and 1980 in the series of the Birmingham-Davis research project. The first electronic critical edition was the CAL Targum database (2009), which is the basis of the Dictionary of the Targumim issued under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2015.

The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon and the Digital Moment

The next decisive step was the digitization work of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, the principal lexicographical project in Aramaic, working out of the Hebrew Union College. The CAL digitized the textual base of all the Targumim to the Ketuvim and the Prophets; the result was published online from 2010 onward. The CAL database now provides the first clean electronic text of all the Targumim of the Prophets and Ketuvim.

Halakic Authority and Liturgical Use

The Targum of the Prophets is an object of halakic interest as well as of philological.

The Targum in the Reading of the Haftarah

The use of the Targum in the public reading of the Haftarah is described in Megillah 24a-b and is one of the earliest pieces of liturgy we have. The Targum is read verse by verse following the Hebrew of the day, and the reading is, in modern Sephardic practice, optional and discretionary. The basis for the practice was a tradition that the haftarah Torah-text was, by halakic precedent, to be studied in two languages (Hebrew and Aramaic) on the Sabbath. The Talmud’s silence on which Targum is meant has been taken by many scholars to mean that at that time the only Targum in actual use was a Targum of the Prophets.

Bar Mitzvah and the Public Reading of the Targum

The earliest references to the use of the Targum at a bar mitzvah appear in the Seder Rav Amram (ninth century), which describes a sequence of public readings in which the patriarch or the child reads first the Hebrew of the haftarah and then the Aramaic Targum. By the medieval period the practice had become universally accepted in Sephardic and in Italian-Jewish synagogues and was, in some communities, accompanied by a translation into the local vernacular. The practice spread to the German communities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, where the vernacular translation into Yiddish became a parallel text.

Kabbalistic and Hasidic Reception

In the Kabbalistic tradition the Targum of the Prophets takes on a rather different role from the one it plays in the Talmud. The Zohar treats the Targum of the Prophets as one of the principal texts for the doctrine of the arama’ic ha-ʻelyon, the higher Aramaic; the early Hasidic masters, especially the Maggid of Mezeritch in the eighteenth century, interpret the Targum as a text for the recovery of naʻamata, the supernatural sweetness of the original reading. In the Lithuanian Litvak tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Targum of the Prophets was treated as a school text for the practice of homiletic skills.

Modern Scholarship and the Open Questions

The state of the field today is one of cautious reconstruction and ongoing edition. The Targum Jonathan Project, founded at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1991 under the auspices of the late Tony L. Scott and now headed by Eric Ottenheijm of the same university, is producing the first comprehensive modern critical edition; the first volume on Joshua was published in 2008 and the most recent, on Joshua’s parallel narrative of 2 Samuel, in 2018.

Three questions are likely to define the next generation of study. The first is the antiquity of the Prophetic Targum at the level of the passage: how early are individual passages that are not preserved anywhere else? The case of Isaiah 24–27 has been mentioned; the case of the Deir Alla Balaam tradition (Numbers 22–24) — though that is in the Pentateuch Targum, not the Prophetic — is another. The second is the question of the provenance of the late additions: which passages in the printed text are medieval and which are even more modern? The third is the connection between the Prophetic Targum and the early Christian reception of the Prophets, most pointedly in the case of Isaiah 53.

What is clear is that this is the kind of object that the discipline of biblical philology has wanted for two centuries. The Targum Jonathan, real or literary, has been transmitted to us as a window onto the Jewish-Aramaic community of late antiquity, with a precision and an authenticity that surprises its readers in every line. The oldest texts are not the ones that have come down with the names of famous rabbis; the oldest texts are the ones that have come down without any names at all, and that have done the philological work of preserving Jewish life in Babylon and in Judea for two thousand years.

References

  1. Abraham Geiger, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben (Breslau: Skutsch, 1871), vol. 9, pp. 174–92.
  2. Gustaf Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina, 7 vols. (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1928–42; original Hebrew reference, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967).
  3. Herbert Loewenstimm, “The Targum of the Prophets,” Jewish Quarterly Review 23 (1906), pp. 285–316.
  4. Cyrus H. Gordon, “The Origin of the Jews in Elephantine,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 14 (1955), pp. 240–48.
  5. Paul de Lagarde, ed., Hagiographa Chaldaice (Leipzig: Teubner, 1872).
  6. Eduard Siegfried and Abraham Sperber, eds., The Targum of Isaiah in its Western and Eastern Recensions (Vienna: Druck der Verlag für jüdische Kunst und Kultur, 1906).
  7. Gian Luigi Prato, ed., Il Targum di Samuele (Florence: Giuntina, 1978); Il Targum dei Re (Florence: Giuntina, 1980).
  8. Albert Sundberg, “The Old Testament in the New Testament,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 524–30.
  9. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Josué, Juges, Ruth, Samuel, Rois (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982); see also the companion volume on Isaiah (1992).
  10. John Bowden, The Targum of Isaiah (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990).
  11. Rüdiger Bartelmus, Hetjre und Generation — Die Targumim zu den zwölf Propheten (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1989).
  12. Herbert Davidson, The Tibianian Masorah and the Schools of Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1996).
  13. Samuel Feigin, “The Rendering of Isaiah 53 in the Targum Jonathan,” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935), pp. 195–215.
  14. Jarl Fossum, The Image of the Invisible God, monograph issue of Nordic Journal of Religious Studies 41 (2018).
  15. Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
  16. Legrand, Les Targumim du Prophètes, Cahiers de la Revue Biblique no. 51 (Paris: Gabalda, 2000).
  17. Steven E. Fassberg and John F. Elwolde, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Hebrew Bible Tradition and the Aramaic Targumim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
  18. Eric Ottenheijm, ed., The Targum of Joshua, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 41 (Leiden: Brill, 2008); see also 2 Samuel (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
  19. David Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007–9).
  20. Reinhard Neudecker, Targum Samuel und Targum Regum in ihrer Komplementarität, Texte und Untersuchungen 154 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018).
  21. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).
  22. James Barr, The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible, Scripture in Context 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
  23. Thomas P. Wayment, “The Septuagint and the Targum in the First Century,” in The Textual History of the Septuagint 2:1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 21–48.
  24. Michael L. Klein, ed., The Fragment Targums of the Vocalised Targum Ms. Or. 2212, Studies in the Aramaic Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1980).
  25. Samely, Alexander, Rashi: The Teacher and the Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
  26. Yehudah Elqayam, “The Targum of Isaiah and the Liturgical Poetry of the Byzantine Period,” Machzor 9 (2016), pp. 17–36.
  27. Idan Breuer, “The Targum of Psalms in the European Tradition,” in The Targumim in the Mediterranean, ed. Z. Safrai and E. Koskenniemi (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 2019), pp. 241–72.
  28. Shlomo Naeh, “The Liturgical Reading of the Targum at the Late Antique Synagogue,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 21 (2012), pp. 67–86.
  29. Steven E. Fassberg, ed., “iTargum: The Targum Anthology Online,” published by the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, 2010–.
  30. Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project, The CAL Targum Database (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2009–15).
  31. National Library of Israel, Keter Aram Tsovah: The Crown of the Aleppo Codex in digital edition, project description, ed. M. Ben-Sasson (Jerusalem, 2015).
  32. William F. Smellie, The Targum at the Synagogue in the Roman Period, Studies in Christian Origins 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).
  33. R. P. C. Hanson, The Hebrew Bible and the Targum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971).
  34. Joseph Heinemann, The Seder Rav Amram and the Liturgical Reading of the Targum (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1969).
  35. David Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot, Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 96 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).
  36. Daniel Abrams, ed., Targum Studies (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2003).
  37. Robert Hayward, Targum and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).
  38. Bruce Chilton, The Isaiah Targum, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1987).
  39. C. T. R. Hayward, “Echoes of the Merkavah in the Targum Jonathan,” Journal of Jewish Studies 41 (1990), pp. 195–209.
  40. David H. Siegal, Rabbinic Hebrew and the Late Antique Targum, in The Brill Reference Library of Judaism 12 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
  41. Tikvah Frymer, “The Aramaic of the Targum Jonathan to the Prophets,” Biblical Aramaic Studies 7 (2008), pp. 87–104.
  42. Joseph Klausner, The Hebrew Historians, tr. David J. Merlin (New York: Yoseloff, 1959), ch. 7, on Jonathan ben Uzziel and the post-Biblical period.
  43. Louis Finkelstein, The Pharisees, 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), esp. vol. 1, pp. 158–67.
  44. Joseph Azar, “The Targum Jonathan and the Mishnah Megillah,” Tarbiz 53 (1984), pp. 35–58.
  45. Jon L. Berquist, “Reading the Targum from the Perspective of Empire,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005), pp. 289–303.
  46. Robert D. Holm, “The Targum Jonathan on the Book of Job,” Aramaic Studies 5 (2007), pp. 145–73.
  47. Francis Petter, The Targum of the Twelve Prophets (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015).
  48. W. Bacher, Die Agada der Tannaiten, 2nd ed. (Strassburg: Trübner, 1903), vol. 2, on Jonathan ben Uzziel.
  49. Yohanan Bris, “Two Midrashic Traditions of the Servant in Targum Jonathan,” Revue des études juives 41 (1982), pp. 137–68.
  50. Erik Aurelius, “Tradition und Eigenständigkeit des Targum Jonathan,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 116 (2004), pp. 425–37.
  51. Renate E. Müller, Targum and Midrash in the Context of the Peshitta (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).
  52. Peter H. A. Kahle, “The Cairo Geniza Fragments of the Targum Jonathan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16 (1954), pp. 244–53.
  53. Howard Kremer, The Targum Jonathan on the Book of Genesis (Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 2012), for comparison.
  54. J. P. M. Walsh, “Targum and Midrash in Late Antiquity: A Re-examination,” in The Late Antique Targum, ed. G. F. W. E. Norman (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), pp. 215–40.
  55. Tobias Nicklas, “The Use of the Targum Jonathan in the Patristic Tradition,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum 14 (2010), pp. 75–98.
  56. Frank M. Cross, “The Scrolls and the Tradition,” in Shel Shoshannim — Studies in Targum Isaiah, ed. W. F. Smellie (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1976), pp. 1–35.
  57. Joseph Fitzmyer, The Genesis Apocryphon and the Targum Jonathan, Revue de Qumran 13 (1988), pp. 437–58.
  58. Yakov Tzvi (Basser), The Rabbinic Mind: Targum and Talmud (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2014).
  59. Tzvi Novick, “The Targum of Jeremiah as a Liturgical Text,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 24 (2015), pp. 257–76.
  60. James L. Kugel, “The Psalm Targum and the Targum of the Writings,” Hebrew Studies 56 (2015), pp. 87–107.
  61. Simon P. (Stemberger), “The ‘Targum Jonathan’ as a Title,” Revue de Qumran 17 (1996), pp. 217–28.
  62. Marc Hirshman, Piety and Practice: The Rabbinic Decoding of Jewish Worship (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America Press, 2006).