The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

248 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
These intensive, in-depth analyses of short passages, in turn, often use
their sample to draw general conclusions about a whole Targum or
about the Palestinian Targums as a whole. But there is a problem
here; no way currently exists of ascertaining if a particular targumic
passage typifies either an individual Targum or the Palestinian
Targums as a group. We cannot even show, for instance, whether
Neofiti's Cain and Abel story or its elaboration of Jacob's Blessings
constitute part of a consistent original plan, part of a haphazard collection,
or derive from later insertions. Since the field of Targum
studies has yet to answer such fundamental questions, the conclusions
of our analyses to date are not merely tentative, but unverifiable. This
places Targum scholars in an untenable situation; while their in-depth
studies are necessary for a detailed understanding of the Palestinian
Targums of the Pentateuch, such analyses presently provide valid
results only for the passage studied; we do not know how, or even if,
they point to the Targums' general nature.
The way out of this cul de sac lies in taking advantage of the
Palestinian Targums' synoptic character. We need to make the
Targums' synopticity the object of analysis, instead of presuming upon
it as a basis for analysis. We need to emphasize the Palestinian
Targums' ordered character—which organizes similarities and differences—by
undertaking a systematic study of the Palestinian Targums
to identify the passages that appear in several Targums and those passages
unique to a single one. Such a study would provide a synoptic
map of the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch, which would reveal
the common nature of these targums as well as each one's distinctive
character. This information would in turn provide the means for
determining whether short passages typified the Targums in which
they appeared and would thus indicate how far we may legitimately
generalize from their analysis.
The main hurdle for such a study is its massive size. To be useful, a
synoptic map needs to be comprehensive; it must encompass all five
books of each Palestinian Targum of the Pentateuch: Neofiti, Pseudo-
Jonathan, and the Fragmentary Targums as well as the Cairo Genizah
America, 1986); and P.V. Flesher, Translation and Exegetical Augmentation in the
Targums to the Pentateuch', in J. Neusner and E.S. Frerichs (eds.), New
Perspectives on Ancient Judaism. Judaic and Christian Interpretation of Texts:
Contents and Contexts, III (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987),
pp. 29-86.