The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

KLEIN Cairo Genizah Targum Texts 23
the remains of two additional leaves to MS E from the book of
Exodus. Another smaller bonus derived from the new fragments was
the first textual attestations of the grammatical form hth for the
determined form of the fern. sing, cardinal number 'one'.
A single page of MS H from the Hebrew Union College Genizah
Collection in Cincinnati was published in 1978, and was subsequently
included in Genizah Manuscripts of Palestinian Targum. 10 One of the
explanations offered for a missing verse in this brief passage was that
it had been mistakenly omitted by the medieval scribe ex homoioteleuton.
Once again, the discovery of an additional page of this
manuscript in Cambridge, containing the immediate continuation of
the text, proved that MS H was actually a Fragment Targum rather
than a running text.
MS K was originally published by P. Grelot in 1957, who recognized
it as an Aramaic liturgical composition for Rosh Hashanah,
which had embedded within it a Palestinian Targum of Genesis 22. n
This was hardly unusual, since the Torah reading for the New Year is
the story of the binding of Isaac from that chapter. In early 1988, I
discovered two additional leaves of this manuscript in the new series
at Cambridge, and in November 1991, I found yet another leaf at the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The New York fragment
provides us with a missing portion of the targumic text and leads
directly into the passage published by Grelot.
All of these examples and those that follow, illustrate, once again,
how arbitrarily the Genizah treasures were split up and dispersed in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, and how they must be
reassembled from among half a dozen major collections over two
continents, in order to be properly researched and understood.
b. There are many Byzantine period Aramaic poems that embellished
the synagogal recitation of the Targum on special occasions.
These include the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15), which was read on the
seventh day of Pesah and the ten commandments (Exod. 20), read on
Shavu 'ot. The above-mentioned liturgical composition on the Binding
of Isaac (Gen. 22), traditionally read on the New Year, is also akin to
10. M.L. Klein, 'A Genizah Fragment of Palestinian Targum to Genesis 15.1-4',
HUCA 49 (1978), pp. 73-87.
11. P. Grelot, 'Une Tosephta targoumique sur Genese XXII dans un manuscrit
liturgique de la Geniza du Caire', Revue des Etudes Juives ns 16 (1957), pp. 5-27
republished in Genizah Manuscripts of Palestinian Targum.