The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

SHINAN The Aggadah of the Palestinian Targums 211
missing. That tnn« should crop up once (and only once) in Targum
Pseudo-Jonathan to our verse would therefore seem to imply a
mechanical translation of a text containing the word mpnn. If so, it is
highly reasonable to claim that the Meturgeman had recourse to the
tradition in the Mechilta, if not the Mechilta itself. 17
I have brought here only a few single examples to a few single phenomena,
and from only one targumic corpus at that. What I wish to
illustrate is that considerations of language and vocabulary (such as
"lies'?! or ton«), of structural pattern (such as the preliminary expansion)
or of literary genres (such as the parable of kings), may furnish
the scholar with an array of traits not characteristic of the material
elemental to the Meturgeman. On this basis, the scholar will be able to
determine that hundreds of traditions appearing in Targum—with or
without a parallel in midrash—were not to the Targum born.
Among the criteria of determination we might add one more: that
the Meturgeman will not create a tradition of Aggadah founded upon
a word-play perceptible to the Hebrew tongue alone:
Genesis 3.15: np:> uanon nn«i c«i "[aier Kin (=...it shall bruise your
head, and you will bruise his heel).
Neofiti:
(= And it shall be when her sons observe the
Law and put into practice the commandments they will aim at you and
smite you [Hebrew: D'ao] on the head and kill you; but when they forsake
the commandments of the Law you will aim at him and wound him on his
heel and make him ill).
Given such examples, I prefer to imagine that the Meturgeman here is
rendering into Aramaic a Hebrew tradition born and bred in the
world of Midrash, based on a word-play between "[Sicr and another
word from the Hebrew root ^pto, translated by the Aramaic root 'no. 18
But an aggadic tradition having an Aramaic word-play as its raison
d'etre (such as the following example) is likely to be targumic, providing
that no un-targumic traits are involved.
17. On Pseudo-Jonathan and the Mechilta see also Shinan, Embroidered Targum,
pp. 168-75.
18. On this verse and its translations see also M. Perez Fernandez, Tradiciones
Mesidnicas en el Targum Palestininse (Valencia, 1981), esp. pp. 40-85; Maher,
Genesis, p. 27, esp. n. 27.