The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

JEWS, GREEKS AND THE HEXAPLA OF ORIGEN
Gerard J. Norton
The title of this article, echoing a book Jews, Greeks, and Barbarians
by Martin Hengel, and a Festschrift Jews, Greeks, and Christians to
W.D. Davies, in 1976, 1 will perhaps be provocative if one detects
there a tendency to identify 'Greeks' with 'Christians' in Palestine in
the first centuries of our era. It will be pointed out that although the
Hexapla of Origen was prepared on Christian initiative, and was consulted
and cited almost exclusively in Christian circles, the basic
problem which the Hexapla tried to resolve was not one of difference
between Jews and Christians engaged in debate, but was a natural consequence
of a situation created -within Judaism, following the adoption
of a particular Hebrew text, which I shall call proto-Masoretic, to the
exclusion of other Hebrew textual forms, in the context of the Greek
of the diaspora, and the limited trilingualism of Palestine. This same
situation provides the background for the Aramaic Targums.
Examining the Hexapla in this way, we are exploring relatively
uncharted waters. The editions of Hexaplaric fragments by F. Field 2
and his precursors have focused attention on the influence of Origen's
Hexapla on subsequent Christian writings. This is not surprising considering
that the greatest source of the edition of Field and his precursors
were the patristic readings citing one or other authority whose
work is compiled in the Hexapla. The Hexapla exercised an influence,
not only on the Greek text itself, through the hexaplaric recension, but
also on the history of exegesis within the Christian tradition as shown
1. M. Hengel, Jews, Greeks and Barbarians: Aspects of the Hellenization of
Judaism in the pre-Christian Period (London: SCM Press, 1980); R. Hamerton Kelly
and R. Scroggs (eds.), Jews, Greeks and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late
Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
2. F. Field, Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1875).