The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

258 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
in Abot becomes a general rule: both the written and unwritten laws
were given to Moses and handed down to the sages through
an uninterrupted chain of authorities: 'Moses...the elders...the
prophets... the men of the Great Synagogue' (m. Ab. 1 1).
After Abot, the concept of the oral torah is present—without
exception—in all the documents of rabbinic Judaism (Tosefta,
Talmuds, Midrashim, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, etc.). The only
exception is Targum Neofiti, and in my opinion this is the most
striking evidence of the antiquity of its ideological system.
3. The Concept of the Preexistent Torah
While Neofiti ignores the concept of oral law, there is in this document
another pillar of rabbinic Judaism: the concept of the preexistence
of the Mosaic law. Even this concept is not very ancient.
Scriptures speak of several covenants and laws (notably, with Adam,
Noah, and Abraham) before the Mosaic law. In the second century
BCE, Ben Sira placed the Mosaic law within the framework of wisdom
tradition, as the highest historical expression of the eternal wisdom
that preceded and rules God's creation (Sir. 24.1-23). This idea was
taken up by the book of Baruch (3.9-4.4) and particularly developed
by Philo of Alexandria, who emphasized 'the harmony' between the
Mosaic law and 'the will of nature, in accordance with which the
entire cosmos itself also is administered' (Op. Mund. 3). This view of
the Mosiac law as the historical incarnation of eternal wisdom does
not imply in the wisdom tradition that the law is also eternal and preexistent;
covenants and laws belong to history, to the relations between
God and humanity. 6 According to Philo, the patriarchs were just, not
because they observed the Mosaic law (which was still about to be
given), but because they obeyed the law of nature (and in this sense
their lives were themselves a sort of anticipated, unwritten law)
(Abr. 5, 16, 275-6; Dec. 1; Virt. 194).
In early Christianity the myth of eternal wisdom was replaced by
the myth of the preexistent Christ. 7 The figure of Christ gradually
assumed both the atemporal functions of wisdom and the historical
6. See G. Boccaccini, The Problem of Knowledge: Wisdom and Law', in
Middle Judaism: Jewish nought, 300 BCE to 200 CE (Minneapolis, 1991), pp. 81-
99.
7. See G. Schimanowski, Weisheit und Messias (Tubingen, 1985).