Imagine a synagogue in Galilee in the third century. A reader stands and reads a verse of the Torah in Hebrew, from a scroll. Beside him stands a second man, with no scroll, who repeats the verse aloud in Aramaic, the language of the street and the market. Then the reader reads the next verse, and the translator renders it in turn. Verse by verse, the congregation hears the scripture twice: once in the holy language, once in their own.

The Aramaic renderings that grew out of this practice are called Targums, from an Aramaic word meaning “translation” or “interpretation.” Some were later written down, and several survive complete. Together with the Greek Septuagint, they are the oldest translations of the Hebrew Bible, and they are unusual among translations because they were never meant to replace the original. The Hebrew was always read first.

Why Aramaic?

Aramaic is a close relative of Hebrew. It had become the common language of diplomacy and trade under the Assyrian and then the Persian empires, and after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE many Jews spoke it in daily life. Parts of the Bible itself are in Aramaic: most of Daniel 2–7, sections of Ezra, and a verse of Jeremiah. By the time of Jesus, Aramaic was the everyday language of most Jews in the land of Israel and in Mesopotamia, though Hebrew was still used in worship, study, and to some extent in speech.

A congregation that understood Aramaic better than Hebrew needed help to follow the reading. The Targum supplied it.

“They gave the sense”

Jewish tradition traced the practice back to Ezra. In Nehemiah 8, Ezra reads the Law to the people gathered in Jerusalem, and the Levites help them to understand:

They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading. (Nehemiah 8:8)

The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud read the word translated “distinctly” as a reference to Targum (Megillah 3a; Nedarim 37b). Most modern scholars think this reads a later custom back into the text: Nehemiah 8:8 probably describes clear reading and explanation, not a formal translation. But the tradition says something true about how the Targum was understood. It was a way of giving the sense, so that the people understood.

The translator in the synagogue

The person who gave the Aramaic was called the meturgeman, the “translator.” The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, lays down rules for him (Megillah 4). The reader of the Torah gives the translator one verse at a time; from the Prophets he may read up to three verses before pausing. Some passages were to be read in Hebrew but not translated aloud, apparently because they were embarrassing or too sacred for paraphrase. Among them, according to the Mishnah, were the story of Reuben and his father’s concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the priestly blessing.

Later rabbinic sources add further rules. The translator should not read from a written text, so that no one would confuse the Aramaic with the scripture itself. He should not raise his voice above the reader’s. And one saying, attributed to Rabbi Judah in the second century, captures the translator’s dilemma: whoever translates a verse strictly literally is a liar, and whoever adds to it is a blasphemer (Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 49a; compare Tosefta Megillah 3:41). The point was that a good translation must convey the meaning, not just the words, but must not slip in ideas of its own. Every translator since has faced the same tension (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?).

Written Targums at Qumran

Although the synagogue Targum was oral, Aramaic translations were also written down, and early. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls are a substantial Aramaic translation of Job from Cave 11, copied probably in the first century BCE or the first century CE, a small fragment of another Job Targum from Cave 4, and a fragment of a Targum of Leviticus. The Cave 11 Job Targum is quite literal, with few of the expansions found in later Targums.

There was some unease about written translations. A story in the Talmud tells how Rabban Gamaliel, on being shown a Targum of Job, ordered it to be buried under a course of stones on the Temple Mount (Shabbat 115a). Whether or not the story is historical, it shows that written Aramaic scripture existed in the first century and that not everyone welcomed it.

Onqelos and Jonathan

Two Targums came to have special authority, especially among the Jews of Babylonia.

Targum Onqelos covers the Torah. The Talmud attributes it to Onqelos the proselyte (Megillah 3a), a name that may be a confused form of Aquila, the Jewish convert who made a literal Greek translation in the second century. Most scholars think Onqelos took shape in the land of Israel, perhaps in the first or second century CE, and was then revised and standardised in Babylonia over the following centuries. It is fairly literal. Its expansions are mostly small, but they are telling. It tends to soften descriptions of God in human terms: where the Hebrew says that God “came down” or “saw,” Onqelos may say that God “revealed himself” or that something “was revealed before” him. It often uses the phrase “the Memra of the Lord,” the “word” of the Lord, where the Hebrew speaks of God acting directly. And it reads some passages messianically. In Genesis 49:10, where the Hebrew speaks of the sceptre not departing from Judah “until he comes to whom it belongs,” Onqelos speaks of the Messiah.

Targum Jonathan covers the Prophets, which in the Jewish Bible include Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings as well as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve. The Talmud credits it to Jonathan ben Uzziel, a pupil of Hillel. It is freer than Onqelos, especially in poetic passages. Its Isaiah names the Messiah at the start of the famous servant passage: in Bruce Chilton’s English rendering of Isaiah 52:13, “Behold, my servant, the Messiah, shall prosper,” although the rest of that chapter is interpreted in a way quite different from Christian readings.

Onqelos and Jonathan were copied alongside the Hebrew in medieval manuscripts and printed in the great Rabbinic Bibles of the sixteenth century (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles). Yemenite Jewish communities have continued to read Onqelos aloud, verse by verse, in the synagogue to this day.

The Palestinian Targums

A second family of Targums to the Torah developed in the land of Israel. These are much more expansive, often adding stories, sermons and explanations to the text.

For a long time they were known mainly from fragments and from a Targum later wrongly called Pseudo-Jonathan. Its name probably arose because an abbreviation meaning “Jerusalem Targum” was misread as “Targum Jonathan.” Pseudo-Jonathan contains very old material but was edited late; at Genesis 21:21 it names the wives of Ishmael as Adisha and Fatima, names that appear to point to the Islamic period. Fragments of other Palestinian Targums were found among the manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah, the storeroom of an old Cairo synagogue, from the end of the nineteenth century.

Then, in 1956, the Spanish scholar Alejandro Díez Macho identified a manuscript in the Vatican Library, catalogued as Neofiti 1, as a nearly complete Palestinian Targum of the whole Torah. The manuscript was copied in the sixteenth century, but the translation it contains is much older. How much older is debated: some scholars have argued for dates before or around the time of the New Testament, others for the third or fourth centuries, with older traditions embedded in it.

A well-known example of how the Palestinian Targums expand the text is Genesis 4:8. The Hebrew says that “Cain said to Abel his brother,” and then reports no words at all before the murder. Several ancient versions supply something short; the World English Bible, following them, has Cain say “Let’s go into the field.” Neofiti and other Palestinian Targums supply a whole argument between the brothers about whether the world was created in love, whether there is judgment, and whether the righteous are rewarded. The silence of the Hebrew has become a debate about divine justice.

Translation and interpretation together

Targums were also made for most of the Writings, including Psalms, Job, Proverbs, the five scrolls read at festivals, and Chronicles. The Targum of the Song of Songs reads the whole book as an allegory of God’s love for Israel through its history. There is no Targum of Daniel or Ezra–Nehemiah, perhaps because parts of them are already in Aramaic.

The Targums matter to historians for several reasons. They show how Jews of late antiquity understood their scriptures. They sometimes help explain readings in the New Testament. In Mark 4:12, for example, Jesus quotes Isaiah 6:10 with the words “and their sins should be forgiven them,” where the Hebrew and the Septuagint speak of being “healed”; the Targum of Isaiah also speaks of forgiveness. Scholars such as Bruce Chilton and Martin McNamara have argued that Jesus and the gospel writers sometimes drew on interpretive traditions later written down in the Targums, though dating that material is notoriously difficult and other scholars are more cautious. And occasionally a Targum points to a Hebrew text slightly different from the Masoretic one, though its free style makes this hard to judge.

What the Targums teach a translator

The Targums show both sides of translation very clearly. A translation that adds nothing may leave readers puzzled. A translation that explains everything may bury the text under the translator’s own interpretation, and readers may not be able to tell which is which.

The synagogue’s answer was to keep the two side by side: the Hebrew read from the scroll, the Aramaic spoken beside it, never mistaken for each other. Open Word Bible tries to keep a similar line visible in a different way. Its translations aim to say what the Hebrew and Greek mean, without the kind of expansions the Palestinian Targums added. Where a sentence needs explanation, or where ancient readers took it differently, the explanation belongs in the reasoning record and the notes, which sit beside the translation and are clearly marked as such (see Showing our work). Like everything in the project so far, these records are AI-assisted drafts awaiting review by named human reviewers.

Sources

  • Alexander, Philip S. “Jewish Aramaic Translations of Hebrew Scriptures.” In Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, edited by Martin Jan Mulder. Assen: Van Gorcum; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.
  • Chilton, Bruce D. The Isaiah Targum. The Aramaic Bible 11. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987.
  • Díez Macho, Alejandro, ed. Neophyti 1: Targum Palestinense, Ms de la Biblioteca Vaticana. 6 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1968–1979.
  • Flesher, Paul V. M., and Bruce Chilton. The Targums: A Critical Introduction. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011.
  • Grossfeld, Bernard. The Targum Onqelos to Genesis. The Aramaic Bible 6. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988.
  • McNamara, Martin. Targum and Testament Revisited: Aramaic Paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.
  • Sokoloff, Michael. The Targum to Job from Qumran Cave XI. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1974.
  • Mishnah Megillah 4; Babylonian Talmud Megillah 3a, Qiddushin 49a, Shabbat 115a.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.