The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

206 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
they can call their own: borrowed feathers alone do they wear. They
are always the vessel catching the overflow, never a flowing source of
creativity in their own right.
It appears to me that there is no need to dwell at length on the
significance of such a perception. Its ramifications can be felt in the
research of many fields: the ancient synagogue, the targumic literature,
the rabbinic attitude toward the Meturgeman in ancient society
and the diffusion of rabbinic literature in antiquity. Subjects too
numerous to mention, each and every one of them is important for
anyone who would perceive the ancient literary world in all its vast
spectrum and who would portray ancient Jewish society in the richest
of detail.
It would seem, therefore, that relegating Targum to the level of
perennial handmaid to the material embedded within Talmud and
Midrash, has yet to be justified by proof. But not only common sense
makes us recognize the possibility that, here and there, those who
molded and carved midrash just may have extracted from a targumic
quarry. At times the midrash explicitly announces that it is quoting
from Targum, using phrases such as p'onnois or other such
expressions:
The Palestinian Talmud Berachot 5.3:
(=Said R. Yose...Those who translate 'My people children of Israel, as I
am merciful in heaven... so you be merciful on earth, a cow or a ewe you
shall not kill both her and her young one in one day'—do not behave
properly.. .) 10
The late M.H. Goshen-Gottstein has already embarked upon the systematic
collection of this type of quotation by the dozen. 11
On the question if the Talmud and Midrash derived any material
from the world of Targum, it requires little effort to respond upon
principle in the affirmative. The difficult part comes in proving it,
when the Midrash itself does not expressly attribute a targumic
source. Let us illustrate the problem in a well-developed tradition
10. See Ps.-J Lev. 22.28 and M. McNamara, The New Testament and the
Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch (Rome, 1966), pp. 133-38.
11. See his Fragments of Lost Targumim, HI (Ramat Can, 1983-1989)
[Hebrew].