Targums

The Targums arose from a liturgical need. By the late Second Temple period most Jews heard the weekly Torah reading in a language they no longer spoke, so a translator, the meturgeman, stood beside the reader and rendered each verse into Aramaic from memory, since writing the translation into the scroll was forbidden. The Mishnah regulates the practice: one verse at a time for the Torah, and certain passages, such as the story of Reuben, to be read but not translated at all. That last rule reveals what a Targum really was. It did not merely transfer words; it decided what the congregation should understand.

The extant Targums soften the Bible's anthropomorphisms, so that where the Hebrew says God saw, the Aramaic may say it was revealed before the Lord. They resolve legal ambiguities in line with rabbinic ruling, identify unnamed figures, and read messianic hope into the prophets. The expansive Palestinian Targums go further, folding entire aggadic narratives into the text, so that Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis carries traditions found nowhere in the Hebrew. For scholars the Targums are therefore a double witness: to the text of the Bible as it was received, and to the living interpretation of the synagogue in late antiquity, verse by verse and week by week.

Targum Onkelos on the Torah is the corpus's official core. Composed in a literary Aramaic and transmitted with its own masorah, it stays close to the Hebrew except where theology or halakhah required adjustment, and the Babylonian Talmud already treats it as the authoritative translation, prescribing private review of the weekly portion twice in Scripture and once in Targum, a practice still followed. Targum Jonathan on the Prophets, traditionally ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, holds the same official standing for the prophetic books and renders their poetry with more interpretive freedom.

Beside these Babylonian-redacted works stands the Palestinian Targum tradition on the Torah: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the most expansive, thick with aggadah and late enough to contain post-Islamic references; the Fragment Targums; and Targum Neofiti, a complete Palestinian Targum identified in the Vatican Library in 1956 after centuries of miscataloguing, the single most important Targum discovery of the modern era. Later Targums cover the Writings, including a double Targum on Esther, though none of these attained liturgical standing. Dating individual Targums is notoriously difficult, since each preserves early traditions inside later redactions, and scholarly estimates for the same work can span half a millennium.