The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

336 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
It is true that sometimes, particularly in Shir Rabba, parts of the Song
are contextualized to specific moments in the history of Israel (usually
to the exodus, the wilderness wanderings, and the giving of the Torah
at Sinai), but this historicizing is applied only in fits and starts. It is
not carried through coherently and chronologically as in the Targum.
There is another way in which Targum Shir ha-Shirim may be
unusual. The exegetical schema is so clever and so consistently applied
that it is reasonable to postulate behind it a single, creative mind, ^[ere
is, possibly, one early rabbinic text to which we can assign an author
in the modern sense of the term. Most rabbinic texts are the result of a
collective effort: they evolved over considerable periods of time and
achieved their present form through the work of compilers and
redactors. The author of Targum Shir ha-Shirim, though he commanded
an encyclopaedic knowledge of rabbinic aggadah, fused the
discrete traditions on which he drew into an organic unity and produced
something that was definitely his own. The manuscript tradition
seems to bear out the unity of authorship. Despite the multiplicity of
manuscripts of Targum Shir ha-Shirim, the textual variants are relatively
unimportant. There are two major textual families—the one
found in manuscripts of Western provenance (North Africa and
Europe), the other in manuscripts from the Yemen. Of the two
recensions the Western is, on the whole, superior to the Yemenite.
The vast majority of the differences between the families, and between
manuscripts of the same family, can be satisfactorily accounted for on
stemmatological grounds as resulting from the progressive textual
corruption of a single archetype. 26
There is a final reason why Targum Shir ha-Shirim may be distinctive.
It appears to be the earliest of the consistently historicizing
exegeses, and, indeed, it may be reasonably claimed as the founding
document of this school of interpretation. Others were to follow its
lead. Saadia argues in his commentary on Shir ha-Shirim that
'Solomon relates in this book the history of the Jews commencing with
their Exodus from Egypt until after the coming of the Messiah, and he
26. I discuss the problems of the textual transmission of Shir ha-Shirim in my
article, 'Stability and Instability in the Transmission of Targum Song of Songs',
Proceedings of the Artefact and Text Conference, Manchester April 1992, forthcoming
as an issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library,
Manchester.