The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

204 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
of the rabbinic aggadah as expressed in Talmud and Midrash. A vast
forest indeed, and it is therefore only natural that we find ourselves
dealing primarily with generalizations. A bird's-eye view must of
necessity renounce the individual trees. Yet even so, we shall not
refrain from plumping out our already broad enough generalizations
with a few pertinent examples.
We have before us, therefore, two well-defined groups of texts: on
the one hand the so-called 'Palestinian Targums' to the Pentateuch,
encompassing the Neofiti MS with its thousands of marginal notes, the
Fragment-Targum in its different versions, fragments of Targum
from the Cairo Geniza, and snips of targumic quotations by the
hundreds in secondary and tertiary sources, not excluding, to some
extent, the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. 3 On the other hand, we have the
sprawling literature of Talmud and Midrash, contemporaries of
Targum. Between these two groups are numerous parallels of
content. 4 Side by side with these parallels we also find traditions of
aggadah in the Targums that are exclusive to Targum, and to Targum
alone, but assumed by many scholars to be taken from lost rabbinic
texts. Our discussion will therefore be divided into two parts, and
devoted to a consideration of these haves and have nots; that is,
targumic traditions with parallels in Midrash and traditions without.
1. Parallels between Targum and Midrash
Thousands of aggadic traditions in the Targums are found in Midrash
as well. 5 Collators, scholars and composers of the various bibliographic
tools are usually content to mention this fact, without
attempting to divert the channel of inquiry into another direction,
namely: which is the original source, and which is the one availing
itself of that original? Yet when a scholar is intrepid enough to determine
which of the two is the principal one and which is subordinate,
the right of primogeniture invariably goes—and almost invariably
3. On Pseudo-Jonathan and its special place within the 'Palestinian Targums'
see my recent book, The Embroidered Targum—The Aggadah in Targum Pseudo-
Jonathan of the Pentateuch (Jerusalem, 1992) [Hebrew].
4. See for instance the lists of parallels to Targum Neofiti compiled by E. Levine
in A. Dfez Macho, Neophyti I (Madrid-Barcelona, 1968-1979).
5. This is no less true for the Halakhic material than it is for Aggadah, but that is
not our subject.