Few documents of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic periods have been more continuously used than the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that Jewish tradition calls Targum Onkelos. It is the dominant Jewish targum from the Babylonian academies onward, survives in hundreds of manuscripts and in millions of printed copies, and remains the obligatory Aramaic reading for the Sabbath afternoons of the synagogue year and the festival recitations of the spring and early summer months. The text it transmits is older than any surviving Septuagint manuscript and is older than the Old Latin version of the Pentateuch. Its decisions about how to render the Hebrew of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy shaped Jewish theological reading for at least two thousand years, and the textual tradition it represents is one of the four earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible into a subsequent language. What follows is the history of how this text came to be written, what it is doing when it translates, how it was kept in the synagogue and in the academy, and what its long and quiet survival has meant for Jewish transmission of the Torah.
The Two Tongues
For most of its life as a written scripture, the Torah was the property of a small class of Judean scribes who wrote it in a language that the rest of the population had to struggle to follow. By the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, Hebrew was already receding from ordinary speech. The Aramaeans of Syria and Upper Mesopotamia had been writing their trade records and royal inscriptions in Aramaic since the tenth century BCE, and as Assyrian and then Babylonian imperial administrations incorporated the Levantine coast into wider tax and message-passing networks, Aramaic became the administrative lingua franca of the entire Fertile Crescent. When Persian kings sat on the throne of Cyrus after 539, they inherited an Aramaic-speaking empire and made Aramaic the official chancery language of their provinces. Greek replaced it in the late fourth century when Alexander’s conquests spread a third lingua franca across the same geography, but for at least four centuries between Cyrus and the early Seleucid period, any Judean peasant who dealt with a Persian satrap, a tax collector, or a road-post official needed Aramaic. By the second century BCE, the author of the book of Ezra could already write a letter that mixed Hebrew and Aramaic in the same colophon, and the author of Daniel could write most of chapters two through seven in an Aramaic that was recognisable to anyone who had heard the squaddies of a Mediterranean port.
The language shift posed a problem that no one had anticipated when the first five books of Moses were canonised. The Torah was now unread in the synagogue for many of the people it was intended to teach. The priests of the Second Temple had to read out a passage, the people had to understand the passage, and yet the people mostly did not speak the language the passage was written in. The community faced what linguists now sometimes call the problem of the late vernacular: the holy language remained coherent and prestigious, but the everyday language had moved on, and no amount of chanting could re-make the gap. Three possible solutions existed. The community could abandon Hebrew and translate everything into Aramaic, accepting the loss of the original sound. It could teach everyone to read Hebrew, which would take generations. Or it could keep Hebrew as the sacred recitation and produce a deliberately literal Aramaic translation that tracked the Hebrew word by word, verse by verse, designed not to stand alone as literature but to live alongside the reading.
The third path was the one that Jewish communities of the late Second Temple period chose, and the document that eventually emerged from that choice is the one known today as Targum Onkelos, the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that has travelled through manuscripts, printings, and now digital editions for something like two thousand years. It is the oldest surviving complete Aramaic Targum, the most widely used, and the only one that bears the imprimatur of the Babylonian Talmud as an authoritative translation that may be read in the synagogue. Its voice is the calmest voice in the Jewish targumic tradition: it does not retell, it does not allegorise, it does not embroider. It stands as close as a faithful translation can stand to a Hebrew text, but it makes a small, principled series of decisions about what to do with the places where the Hebrew had said something that the theology of the second century would no longer tolerate.
The Synagogue and the Meturgeman
The exact form of the synagogue that emerged in the late Second Temple period is partly conjecture. Philo of Alexandria, writing in the early first century CE, called synagogues proseuchai, “places of prayer,” and Josephus mentioned them in the context of the Jewish communities of Rome and the Diaspora, but neither author described a standard liturgy. The Mishnah, redacted around 200 CE but drawing on older practice, takes the existence of a regular weekly Torah reading as a given. The tractate Megillah sets out a calendar of how the five books of Moses were to be read through, and the tractate Ta’anit and the Tosefta Megillah elaborate the calendar of special Sabbaths and festival readings. By the time these sources reach us in their final redaction, the practice is already ancient, and the bare bones of the liturgy can be reconstructed from the Mishnah’s references to a synagogue service that included the recitation of the Shema, the Tefillah, the reading of the Torah from a scroll, and a translation into Aramaic.
The Targum was understood to be sacred enough to require delivery in the synagogue by a specific office. The Mishnah records the procedure: a single person, called hamevargin in Hebrew or meturgeman in Aramaic, would stand beside the Torah reader and translate each verse clause by clause into Aramaic after it was read in Hebrew. (The name meturgeman is a Jewish Aramaic borrowing, and is the source of the modern Greek metraglotitis, the Arabic tarjumān, and the English “dragoman.” Although tradition credited the institution of the meturgeman to Ezra the Scribe, the office is best understood as a development of the Second Temple period, and the Mishnah’s formal arrangements probably reflect the practice of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic period.) The procedure was strict. Only the Torah itself was to be read in Hebrew. The translation was not to be substituted for the Hebrew reading. Both were done from the same scroll, and the meturgeman was not allowed to look at the Hebrew text while he was translating, since the office demanded that the Aramaic be spoken from memory, a stipulation that tells us the targumic tradition was a fixed text from very early on.
The translation the meturgeman delivered was therefore not a free improvization in any one service but the rehearsal of a received version. The Talmud later records the substance of what could and could not be done. The meturgeman was allowed to render the text into Aramaic. He was not, however, permitted to render it into Greek, which the rabbis considered a language whose readers “had no need of the Targum,” and on a fast day he was not permitted to read the Targum aloud at all, since the mournful occasion required the bare Hebrew. Most importantly, the Mishnah and the Tosefta forbade the meturgeman from substituting his own free paraphrase for the received text. The translation was a written tradition, learned by heart, and the meturgeman’s task was to deliver it with accuracy. This is why we have a Targum at all today. The very fact that the synagogue translators were not improvising meant that the Aramaic text of the Targum stabilised within a generation or two of the institution of the meturgemanate, and the text we now read is descended, in its essential line, from the version that the synagogue meturgemans of the late Second Temple period recited.
The relationship between Targum Onkelos and the synagogue meturgemanate was and is, however, more complicated than the Mishnah makes it sound. Targum Onkelos is one text. The Targum that the meturgeman recited in the synagogue of Alexandria was almost certainly not identical to the Targum that the meturgeman recited in the synagogue of Babylon. Provincial Aramaic dialects diverged sharply across the Achaemenid and Hellenistic Near East, and even the most committed effort to stabilise a single translation could not have produced one that travelled cleanly from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. What we have as Targum Onkelos is the translation that the Babylonian Jewish communities settled on, with roots that scholars now generally believe go back to the Land of Israel and a process of editorial standardisation that probably continued into the late first century CE. This places Targum Onkelos not as the earliest Targum to be recited, but as the Targum that preserved the oldest recoverable Targumic form in a sufficiently clean line that it could be carried forward.
Onkelos and Aquila
The name is one of the small mysteries of early Jewish bibliography. The Aramaic translation of the Torah into the form in which we now have it is called, in the Talmud and in the earliest Babylonian Jewish references, Targum Onkelos or Targum Unqelos, and the tradition since at least the geonic period has identified the translator as a proselyte to Judaism named Onkelos or Aquilas. The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 3a and Gittin 56b) and the later Midrash and Targum commentary traditions connect this Onkelos variously with the Roman patrician convert of the house of Kalonymos of the first century CE, or with the second-century translator of the Hebrew Bible into Greek known as Aquila of Pontus, the student of Rabbi Akiva who produced the most slavishly literal Greek version of the Old Testament. The identification of Targum Onkelos with Aquila of Pontus persists in some medieval sources and into modern popular literature, but the scholarly consensus since the late nineteenth century has been that the two are unlikely to be the same person. The Greek of Aquila’s translation is a hexaplaric monument of the early second century with a translation philosophy that turns every Hebrew particle into a distinct Greek word, by deliberate design of the rabbis of Yavneh. The Aramaic of Targum Onkelos is not that literal. It is a careful translation, but it permits ellipsis, the regularising of awkward constructions, and a number of small harmonisations with what the translator thought the original was supposed to say. If the Babylonian tradition had wanted to attribute the Targum to a translator whose hero was Rabbi Akiva, it could have named Akiva’s student; that the tradition is confused about the identification suggests that by the time the name was attached, the identity of the actual translator had already been forgotten. The most that can be said is that Targum Onkelos is named after a shadowy figure called Onkelos, almost certainly a convert, possibly a Roman-period aristocrat, and the translation itself is the work of unknown Palestinian Jewish tradents extending from the late Second Temple period into the Tannaitic era.
The dating of the translation has been worked out carefully from linguistic and content evidence. The Aramaic of Onkelos is sometimes labelled “Babylonian Targumic Aramaic,” but the dialect actually preserves a substantial set of features that mark it as Western, that is, Judean, Aramaic, rather than as the Babylonian Aramaic that one finds in the talmudic dialect of the academies. This western layer is the older element, and most scholars now hold that the translation was originally composed in the Land of Israel, in the second or early first century BCE, and was carried east by the Babylonian Jewish communities, who standardised and slightly updated the text to fit their own dialect. Some Old Aramaic features remain archaic enough to suggest that the core of the text was already fixed by the early first century BCE. Other features, particularly the way the translator softens anthropomorphisms, reflect the mature theology of the late Second Temple period, and these would be difficult to date much before the first century BCE. The Targum in its present form is therefore a composite: an old translation of the Torah into a Western Aramaic, modified and lightly harmonised over centuries of use in Jewish synagogue and school.
The Targum was not the only Aramaic translation in circulation. Targum Neofiti, preserved in a single medieval manuscript found in the Vatican Library in the twentieth century, is a Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch that paraphrases the Hebrew much more freely and adds stories and elaborations that the Targum Onkelos scrupulously avoids. The Fragmentary Targums are a collection of Palestinian Targumic texts recovered mostly from the Cairo Geniza and the European libraries, and they preserve mixed forms between literal translation and free paraphrase. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, sometimes printed as Targum Yerushalmi in older editions, is a much later Palestinian Targum that draws on Targum Onkelos for its base text but adds substantial midrashic material. Targum Onkelos is therefore best understood not as a unique document but as the survivor of an entire Targumic industry, the most disciplined and conservative of a wider set of translations. It is the only one that came down to Babylon, that came up again on the printed page, and that the Jewish tradition treated as authoritative.
The Translation in Practice
What makes Targum Onkelos distinctive as a translation is its restraint. When the Hebrew text is straightforward, Targum Onkelos is straightforward. When the Hebrew text is awkward, Targum Onkelos is awkward in the same way. When the Hebrew uses a poetic construction or a rare vocabulary, the Aramaic translator tracks the unusual word by unusual word, sometimes choosing an unusual Aramaic synonym even where a more natural one exists, precisely so that the Aramaic reading will preserve something of the difficulty of the original. This principle of close tracking has limits. The translator does not preserve every particle, does not translate every pronoun, and does not refuse to smooth awkward Hebrew syntax where the Hebrew itself was using standard idiomatic construction. The rule of thumb is that Targum Onkelos translates carefully, but does not translate blindly. Its choices about what to translate and what to leave untranslated tell us what a careful first-century Jewish translator thought about the relationship between Hebrew and Aramaic literary expression.
The most famous set of Targumic interventions concerns the rendering of divine anthropomorphisms. The Hebrew Bible freely speaks of God’s hand, God’s eye, God’s walking in the garden, God’s smelling of Noah’s sacrifice, God’s repenting that he had made man. By the late Second Temple period, these presentations had become problematic. Philo of Alexandria was already worried about the philosophical implications of a God with hands. The rabbis of Yavneh were concerned that the unlearned reader might take such Hebrew imagery literally, and a substantial working principle was developed: anthropomorphisms should be rendered in the Aramaic as circumlocutions that preserve the meaning while avoiding any physical implication about God. So, for example, the famous Hebrew verb vayyit’aru, “and they [the boxers at Peniel] saw God,” becomes in Genesis 32:31, in the standard reading of Onkelos, an assertion that they understood a great thing from before the Lord. The “hand of the Lord” is rendered “the Memra of the Lord,” using a technical Aramaic term whose precise meaning has been much debated in modern scholarship, but which clearly functioned as a deliberate philosophical distance-marker. The “repenting” of God in the flood narrative (Genesis 6:6) is rendered as a sequence of divine self-talk, “and the Lord said in his Memra” or similar, which softens the implication of a change of mind into something less than a literal repentance.
The rules of the soft anthropomorphism translation are the most commented-on feature of Targum Onkelos, but they are not the whole picture. The Targum also smooths textual difficulties, anticipates reader objections, and occasionally anticipates the harmonising work that other books of the Hebrew Bible would do. The translation of “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) is, famously, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” followed by the comment “and the Memra of the Lord created man in his likeness” – introducing the divine plural as an address to the angels or the heavenly host, and switching to the singular “he” before the action of creation. The rendering of “I will go down with you into Egypt” becomes “I will send my Memra with you into Egypt,” removing the threat of descent into an earthly space. Most strikingly, the Targum sometimes preserves a literal translation and follows it with an uqla, a “but” clause that marks the alternative reading. The effect is of a translator who wants the Aramaic reader to know that the Hebrew has said something, that the standard Aramaic reading has followed that something closely, and that there is a theological framework in which both can be held without embarrassment.
The cases where the Targum Onkelos seems to ignore or invert the Hebrew are usually cases where a later rabbinic reading had become, by the translator’s time, the received reading. The verse “they shall cleave to his wife” in Genesis 2:24 is rendered “they shall cleave to his wife,” preserving the masculine pronoun even though the Hebrew has no antecedent. The Hebrew here is fine, but the Targumist was already wary of the awkwardness. The verse “God created the camels for Abram” (Genesis 12:16) is a similar wash: the Hebrew is straightforward, the Aramaic is straightforward, and the only intervention is the simple elision of an awkward prepositional phrase. None of these are big theological moves. They are the small readjustments of a careful translator trying to make the Hebrew text work in a new linguistic setting.
Print, Polemic, and Modern Scholarship
Targum Onkelos entered the modern age the way most early Jewish texts did. The first printed edition, an editio princeps, appeared in Bologna in 1482 as part of the inaugural production of the Soncino printing house, attached to the printed Hebrew Torah. The Italian printers of the period were careful with the spelling of the Hebrew and the Aramaic, but they were not always punctilious about the orthography of the Aramaic Targum, and the first printed text bears the marks of standardisation in directions that do not always preserve the manuscript tradition. The Prague 1560 printing, the Bomberg Bible of 1517 and 1525, and the Antwerp Plantin Polyglot of 1569-1572 all incorporated the text of Onkelos into their biblical apparatus. The Plantin Polyglot is the first to print the Targum in interlinear setting between the Hebrew text and the Latin Vulgate, an arrangement that defined the visual presentation of the Targum for centuries of European Bible scholarship.
The Christian Hebraists of the Reformation were consumed with the Targum because they hoped it would tell them something useful about the Hebrew text. The Western European polyglots, beginning with the Complutensian and culminating in the Paris and London Polyglots, treated the Targum as evidence for the earliest Aramaic forms of biblical translation, comparable in authority to the Septuagint for the Greek. The Targum was often cited by polemical Christian Hebraists in arguments with Jews about the messianic interpretation of the Hebrew prophets, since the Targumic expansions of certain messianic verses were familiar texts in the medieval Jewish-apostate tradition. (The Protestant scholar Peter Fagius’s 1546 Strasbourg publication of the Targum, reprinted in many later editions, was specifically oriented toward Christians who wanted an Aramaic reading of the Old Testament. Its preface is unusually pointed about the apologetic value of reading Targumic expansions of messianic prophecies in their original language, and it remained in print throughout the seventeenth century.)
Modern critical scholarship of Targum Onkelos began in the nineteenth century, with the first wave of Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars and their Christian counterparts. Abraham Geiger, Julius Fürst, and Moritz Steinschneider in the Jewish tradition and Abraham Berliner in the Christian tradition worked out the basic issues of dating, dialect, and provenance. The 1896 edition of Abraham Sperber’s Targum Onkelos on the Torah was the first text to attempt a clean critical edition, although the manuscript basis was still relatively small. The 1930s and 1940s saw the publication of the larger Western Targum manuscripts, particularly the British Library’s collection of Palestinian and Babylonian Targums and the Cairo Geniza fragments gathered in the Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge. These manuscript discoveries enormously expanded the field, and a whole industry of Targumic text criticism has emerged around them.
The central modern editions of Targum Onkelos are A. Sperber’s fifth-century Babylonian vulgate text in The Bible in Aramaic (1959-1973, posthumous for the later volumes), the partial edition of the Palestinian Targum Neofiti published by the Sorbonne in 1967-1970 under the auspices of the Dominican Fathers of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, and the ongoing Bible in Aramaic series produced by the Hebrew University Targum project. These critical editions make possible what was impossible a century ago: a reading of the Targum that distinguishes the earliest recoverable layer from the later expansions, that can plot the development of the anthropomorphism tradition across manuscript groups, and that can identify the points at which the Babylonian Jewish tradition adapted the older Palestinian text. The Lehman-Fuld Targum Onkelos edition, first printed in 1934 and still in print, remains the standard house edition for synagogues and yeshivot, and is now available in the digital ArtScroll and Sefaria editions as well. The task of editing a comprehensive critical Targum is not yet complete, and a fully reconstructed text of Targum Onkelos is still in the future.
The translation is now more widely read than at any previous moment in its long history. Sefaria’s open digital text, the Mechon-Mamre Hebrew-Aramaic parallel editions, and the cuneiform-tablet-style scholarly editions of the Hebrew University project have made the Targum accessible to readers who a generation ago would have had to find a complete text in a university library. The synagogue tradition continues to use Targum Onkelos as the Pentecost Targum, and the traditional Yemenite Jewish community uses a different manuscript stem that derives from an old generation but is essentially still Targum Onkelos. The Akiva tradition of reading the Targum as a translation rather than as a revealing text endures in most Jewish communities, and even where the Targum has been displaced by modern Bible translation in the liturgy, it remains a study text in many yeshivot and a serious object of scholarly work in the universities.
What Targum Onkelos offers the twenty-first-century reader is a window into the Jewish mind of the late Second Temple period, through the discipline of a translator whose commitments were conservative and whose theology was careful. It is not a work of daring. It is a work of slow, careful keeping. The translation accepted that a faithful Aramaic Torah would have to obey the Hebrew closely, would have to say what the Hebrew said, would have to remember what the Hebrew meant, would have to be read in the synagogue on Monday and Thursday and Sabbath morning, week after week, generation after generation, until the day it was finally printed and the printing press and its digital descendants took over from the meturgeman. Its survival to this point is, in its small way, a minor victory for keeping things.
Targum Onkelos and the Synagogue Today
The next decades of Targum scholarship will probably be shaped by three new technical resources that have only begun to bear fruit. The first is the Sinai Geniza Project at Cambridge, which has been re-photographing the Taylor-Schechter collection under multispectral illumination and has released high-resolution digital images of several hundred fragmentary Targum leaves that had been unreadable for the better part of a century. The second is the corpus-linguistic study of the Targum, which has only become possible in the last fifteen years as digital editions of Onkelos, Neofiti, the Fragment Targums, and Pseudo-Jonathan have all become text-searchable in a single workspace. The third is the comparative study of Targum Onkelos with the non-Jewish Aramaic Bible traditions of the early first millennium, including the Christian Palestinian Aramaic lectionaries and the Syriac translation tradition, both of which preserve readings that the editor of Targum Onkelos would not have seen when he set the standard text in the third or fourth century CE. Each of these three lines of inquiry is producing small but cumulative gains in the reconstruction of the earliest recoverable text of the Targum.
The most surprising thing about Targum Onkelos in the twenty-first century is the breadth of the population that still hears it. In a typical Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogue of London, Brooklyn, or Jerusalem, the weekly reading of the Pentateuch follows the same pattern that the meturgeman of late antiquity followed. The Torah scroll is unrolled at the bimah, the reader chants the Hebrew in the traditional cantillation, and a second person, often the rabbi’s assistant or a designated congregant, translates the passage clause by clause into the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos. In many Conservative and some Reform congregations the practice has been abbreviated or replaced by English paraphrase, but in the communities that have kept the tradition, the meturgeman’s voice is still a Sunday-morning and Sabbath-morning presence. In Sephardic and Mizrahi communities the equivalent is Targum Jonathan for the prophetic reading, but the Pentateuch Targum remains Onkelos, and the prayer communities of Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran preserve local manuscript traditions of the same text.
The Mishnah tractate Megillah records a list of forty-eight verses that are not to be rendered into Targum in the synagogue, and this list, while sometimes forgotten or argued over, is still respected in observant communities. The verses are mostly ones where a literal translation would either give offence to a sanctified name of God, raise messianic speculation in front of a vulnerable congregation, or pass over a passage of such intimate or disturbing import that the audience should hear it unmediated by Aramaic explanation. The verses include the second half of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-19, but not the verses that follow), the second half of the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:1-31, but not the verses that follow), and the passage of the High Priest’s breastplate stones. The list is itself a piece of rabbinic decisional literature that has been transmitted in the same chain of custody as the Targum itself, and its survival is one of the small quiet proofs of how carefully the tradition has been kept.
Even more striking than the synagogue persistence of Targum Onkelos is its penetration into digital media and modern Jewish learning. The Sefaria open-access online edition has, since its launch in 2013, made the entire Targum available to any reader who has a web connection. The Koren Jerusalem Bible commentary and the Judaica Press edition have made an interlinear Aramaic-Hebrew format accessible in physical book form. The standard curriculum of a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school in 2026 includes three to five years of formal Targum study, usually using the Mikra’ot Gedolot or the Artscroll Stone Edition of the Chumash with the Targum laid out in a parallel column. The Karaite Jewish community, which has its own Targum tradition distinct from the Rabbanite, has separately maintained an Aramaic Bible tradition that descends from the same late-antique stock as Targum Onkelos. The most ambitious current digital project, the Hebrew University Targum Online project, has set itself the goal of producing a fully searchable parallel Hebrew-Aramaic critical text, with morphological tagging of every word in both languages, and of releasing the data under an open licence that any Hebrew reader can consult.
The interpretive role of Targum Onkelos in modern Jewish and Christian biblical scholarship continues to expand. The Pentateuchal Targum is now routinely cited in monographs and dissertations alongside the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, as one of the four great textual witnesses to the early interpretation of the Hebrew. The shift in modern biblical scholarship from a purely Masoretic-text base to a wider textual base has made the Targum more important than it was for the older generations of Christian Hebraists, who had treated the Targum as a curiosity of the Jewish liturgical tradition. Today, the Targum’s evidence is consulted whenever a difficult passage of the Pentateuch, particularly in the legal material of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, calls for evidence of how the received text had been interpreted before the destruction of the Second Temple. The Targum is also used in modern Jewish legal and theological discussions, since the rabbinic use of biblical proof-texts often implicitly assumes the Targumic interpretation.
What does the next generation of Targum scholarship look like? The unresolved questions fall into a small set of well-defined buckets: the precise relation between Onkelos and its Babylonian and Palestinian manuscript traditions, the reconstruction of the earliest recoverable form of the text using the surviving manuscript evidence and the early Babylonian geonic citations, the relationship between Onkelos and the much later Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the application of digital computational methods to the textual criticism of the Targum, and the comparative study of Targum Onkelos with the Samaritan Targum and the Christian Aramaic Bible traditions. None of these questions will be closed in this generation. The Targumic edition of the Hebrew University project is estimated to take at least another twenty years to complete, and the next generation of Targum scholars is now training in Jerusalem, Berlin, Cambridge, and Harvard, with a much larger dataset of manuscripts at their disposal than the founders of the field had in 1930.
References
- The Bible in Aramaic: The Pentateuch According to Targum Onkelos – Abraham Sperber, Brill, 1959.
- Akkadian, Aramaic and Hebrew – A. Leo Oppenheim, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1964.
- Targum – Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd edition), Macmillan Reference / Thomson Gale, 2006.
- Targum Neofiti – Sefaria open digital edition of the Vatican manuscript B.M. R.Vari 147.
- The Targum of Onkelos to the Torah: Text and Readings – Bezalel Porten, in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, vol. 31 (1963).
- Targum Onkelos – Jewish Virtual Library / Encyclopaedia Judaica article summary, 2024.
- The Aramaic Bible (multi-volume series) – Martin McNamara, Michael Maher et al., T&T Clark / Bloomsbury, 1987-2000.
- The Targum and the Septuagint: Genesis 1-6 – Bernard Grossfeld, in Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 77 no. 4 (1987).
- The Targums as Sacred Writings – Bernard Grossfeld, Princeton University Press, 2008 (on-line bibliographic excerpts).
- The Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan and Its Compositional History – John C. Reeves, Brill, 2009 (publisher’s page).
- Free University of Berlin Targum Online – Institut für Judaistik, ongoing open-access manuscripts catalogue, consulted 2026.