The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

250 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
one. The second type of expansions are distinctive to a single Targum
and have no parallels with any other.
My study corroborates this description, with only minor differences.
The two types of expansions clearly characterize the Palestinian
Targums. Among Neofiti, Pseudo-Jonathan and the Paris and Vatican
versions of the Fragmentary Targums, there are a total of 2,431
individual expansions, which, when parallels are taken into account,
amount to 1,373 different expansions. Of these, 539 are shared by
several Targums. By contrast, 834 expansions appear in only one. But
whereas Shi nan estimates that 95 per cent of these unique expansions
appear in Pseudo-Jonathan, my research reveals that only 83 per cent
do. The rest occur predominantly in Targum Neofiti.
The synoptic analysis, however, permits more in-depth investigation.
If we look at a breakdown of the shared expansions, they initially
appear regularly distributed. Of the 539 parallel expansions, 187
appear in all four Targums, 147 occur in three of them, while the
remaining 205 expansions appear in just two Targums. But further
analysis reveals that Neofiti plays a dominant role among these parallels.
Neofiti contains 649 expansions, 515 of which parallel an expansion
in another Targum. Those 515 make up 96 per cent of all shared
expansions in all Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch. When we
look at the two Fragmentary Targums, it is not hard to see why.
Vatican has a total of 322 expansions, of which 299 parallel Neofiti,
some 93 per cent. Similarly, the Paris Targum has a total of 287
expansions, of which 258 are shared by Neofiti, some 90 per cent.
But the synoptic map most strikingly sets out the relationship
between Neofiti and Pseudo-Jonathan. It reveals Pseudo-Jonathan as
both more and less of a Palestinian Targum than all Targums except
Neofiti. On the one hand, the largest number of parallels with Neofiti
appears in Pseudo-Jonathan. Of the 515 expansions Neofiti shares with
other Targums, 461—some 90 per cent—occur in Pseudo-Jonathan.
This comprises over 150 more parallels than either Fragmentary
Targum. Although these shared expansions constitute less than half of
Pseudo-Jonathan's expansions, they still indicate that Pseudo-Jonathan
contains more expansions paralleling Neofiti than any other
Palestinian Targum. So despite the many features in common with
Targum Onqelos, Pseudo-Jonathan clearly belongs to the classification
of Palestinian Targum.
On the other hand, Pseudo-Jonathan contains extensive material