The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

22 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
targumic tradition (e.g., MS Villa-Amil no. 5), 8 as opposed to the
Targum of Psalms in the printed Biblia Rabbinica.
At about the same time, I spent several days at the library of the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Dr Neil Danzig kindly
arranged my access to the ITS Genizah Project data base that he is
preparing with the assistance of several other scholars. The computerized
data base lists, among others, all Targum fragments; but it
does not yet fully describe their contents. Therefore, I made a short
list of all fragments that might contain Palestinian Targum, and
checked each one in the Manuscript Reading Room. This led to some
very interesting new discoveries, including an additional fragment of
a liturgical targumic text to Genesis 22 (MS K), as well as a new
exemplar of Onqelos written in serugin (shorthand), which I shall
describe in detail later.
Ill
I should like to devote the remainder of this paper to the presentation
of some of the most recent discoveries of Targum manuscripts in
Genizah collections, most of which are already in press or in an
advanced stage of research towards publication.
Additional Fragments of Known Manuscripts
a. Additions to MSS D, E, H and K of Palestinian Targum of the
Pentateuch have come to light. 9 In the cases of MSS E, H and K, they
contain important information regarding these texts:
All of the fragments of MS E, one of the oldest manuscripts of
Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch, that had been collected by
Kahle and Diez Macho from the libraries of Oxford, Cambridge,
Leningrad and New York, were confined to the book of Genesis.
Since the 16 well-preserved leaves spanned almost the entire book,
from ch. 6 to ch. 43, it was suggested that perhaps the complete original
Targum had been limited to Genesis. This hypothesis had to be
discarded with the discovery in the Cambridge Additional Series of
8. A. Dfez Merino, Targum. de Salmos (Bibliotheca Hispana Biblica 6; Madrid:
C.S.I.C., Institute 'Francisco Suarez', 1982).
9. The texts of D, E and H were recently published: M.L. Klein, 'New
Fragments of Palestinian Targum from the Cairo Genizah', Sefarad 49 (1989),
pp. 123-33; and see n. 3 above.