The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

BOCCACCINI Targum Neofiti as a Proto-Rabbinic Document 261
have wrought evil, and (so) forfeited my (right to) sustenance
(without care)' (m. Qid. 4.14).
For Neofiti instead, manual work is a gift from God. Adam prays
'not to be reckoned as the cattle, but to rest from the labour of (his)
hands...In this way (God) will distinguish between the sons of man
and cattle' (Gen. 3.18).
With his eulogy of manual work joined to the study of Torah
('Excellent is study of the Law with worldly occupation', m. Ab. 2.2),
Abot tries, once again, to find a balance between different trends and,
once again, its compromise was to be the winning one in later rabbinic
documents.
5. The Myth of the Palestinian Targum
An examination of the system of Neofiti as a whole—not as a container
of synoptic traditions and parallels—leads one to consider the
second half of the second century 10 as the period in which such ideological
system took shape around the idea of the eternal Torah. Neofiti
is a reliable source of formative rabbinic Judaism.
Certainly, Neofiti was not born from nothing. Targum as a method
of exegesis is older, as shown by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and traditions
in Neofiti are the fruit of a long exegetical activity, as shown by the
numerous parallels with older documents, notably the Liber
Antiquitatum Biblicarum, Josephus's Antiquitates ludaicae, and the
New Testament. However, the presence of parallels proves neither the
antiquity of Neofiti nor the existence of an archetype. 11 'The
Palestinian Targum' as a document from which the following
Targums would be born by adding or subtracting material, is a myth
of modern interpreters, from P. Kahle onwards. 12 The risk—very
10. Also A. Diez Macho agreed that 'in its present recension' Neofiti 'seems to
belong to the first or second century AD' (A. Dfez Macho, 'The Recently Discovered
Palestinian Targum: Its Antiquity and Relationship with the Other Targums', VTSup
7 [1960], pp. 222-45).
11. It only proved the antiquity of some traditions in Targums. 'Given the
assumption that the New Testament and the Targumim were contemporaneous, one
still has to establish that the text of the Targum we have today corresponds to the text
of New Testament times, and this in no easy task' (A.D. York, 'The Dating of
Targumic Literature', JSJ 5 [1974], pp. 49-62).
12. P. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1959).