The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

DATING THE LANGUAGE OF THE PALESTINIAN TARGUMS
AND THEIR USE IN THE STUDY OF FIRST CENTURY CE TEXTS
Stephen A. Kaufman
This past semester one of my students prepared a seminar paper on
the targumic traditions of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. I
found his choice of texts both appropriate and amusing, since targumic
studies has been characterized on more than one occasion as
just such a 'Tower of Babel'. 1 Sometimes I myself have tended to
regard targumic studies as a problem in search of a solution; but at
other times we have seemed rather to have a consensus solution in
search of a problem. At the very least, for quite a few years now targumic
studies has surely been a discipline in search of a methodology.
I have talked and written about methodology before, 2 so I shall try not
to bore you this morning by rehashing old ideas. Rather, my remarks
today are an attempt to suggest a few ways in which recent publications,
future publications, and new technologies might give some
direction to that search for methodology.
It is hardly news to anyone in this room that A. Diez Macho's 1956
announcement of his discovery of the Codex Neophyti I in the Vatican
Library prompted a renaissance in the discipline of targumic studies—
a renaissance centered on the question of the nature of the Palestinian
Targumim in general, and the Targum Yerushalmi, or Palestinian
Targum of the Pentateuch in particular. The 1960s and early 1970s
witnessed an avalanche of new studies and introductions to targumic
studies. During that time the relative antiquity and the relative
value of the several pentateuchal targumim were argued to death, but
rarely carefully studied. Virtually every conceivable combination or
1. Cf. R. Hayward, The Targum of Jeremiah (The Aramaic Bible, 12;
Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1987), p. 15.
2. 'On Methodology in the Study of the Targums and their Chronology', JSNT
23 (1985), pp. 117-24.