The Aramaic Version of the Bible: Contents and Context

Etan Levine's volume is essentially a sort of descriptive biography of the Targum per se, presenting a literary composite portrait of the ancient Jewish Aramaic versions of the Bible. Thus the title of the work is somewhat misleading, as it gives the impression of the existence of a single uniform Targum for the entire Hebrew Bible. That this is far from the truth is recognized by the author himself, who says in the opening paragraph of the preface (p. vii), “as varied a genre of writings as the Aramaic targum.” He goes on to describe the various Targums in chapter 4, “The Extant Targums” (pp. 20—30), in which he illustrates the peculiar character and complexities of certain Targums. Here Levine repeatedly suggests that no reliable data exist to identify the authors and compilers of the various Targums, nor to determine for what specific purposes they created these Aramaic versions or how the literary transmission was achieved. In view of this problem, would it not have been wiser to have pluralized the word “version” in the title in order to reflect the complexity of the situation, not to mention the real intention of the work—to present a composite picture of an Aramaic Bible version based on the various characteristic features as manifest in the different Targums as currently extant.