The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

208 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
proving—as I hope to do later on—that in this particular case the
Midrash is indeed first and foremost; the Targum only subordinate.
Even so, we shall still have difficulty in deciding if the Meturgeman
made use of the midrash in Genesis Kabbah, or whether the words of
R. Joshua were known to him from elsewhere. Then again, perhaps
both of them—Targum Pseudo-Jonathan as well as R. Joshua—are
making use of a known tradition that anteceded them both. The verdict
is difficult, if not impossible, in this instance as in many others.
But the real question is not the kind of affinity between sources of
Targum and Midrash; not whether the affinity is direct or whether an
intermediary is lurking somewhere in between. The question is the
direction of the borrowing. 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' is all
very well and good, but we must face the fact that if one of these
compositions is doing the lending, then the other one must perforce be
the one borrowing. And here we have to admit that at the current
stage of research, tools suited to untangling this knotty issue have yet
to emerge. From the straits of this methodological distress I propose
that the issue be approached from a new direction. Our basic premise,
of course, is that each case must be examined on its own merits without
pre-conception or prejudice. There must be an initial readiness to
accept the possibility that the Targum might be reflecting traditions
originating in the world of the Bet Midrash, or, conversely, that the
Targum is the source for these and other dicta in the literature of
Talmud and Midrash.
For the sake of crystallizing a method suited to this important question,
tentative and experimental though it may be, we must clarify
what is a tradition of Aggadah defineable as targumic in its very
essence and from its very beginning, and what is a tradition that must
have been imported into the Targum from beyond. In other words,
we must set forth the basic principles characterizing the targumic
Aggadah or—contrariwise, and this is the method that I propose
here—we must search out the traits that cannot be characteristic of the
aggadic traditions created by the Meturgeman. And by discussing the
negative we will, with time, learn how to build the positive.
The method of research that I now propose is based on the assumption
that there are things that a Meturgeman cannot and will not do (in
contrast to one preaching in the academy or the synagogue, and in
contrast to the pedagogue in the school). Aggadic traditions that are
found in the Targums but originate in these exegetical categories—and