The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

70 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
tiberiennes. Dans ce volume nous avons parfois trouve'—quoique de
maniere moins nette—des traces d'une distinction en deux traditions qui
pourrait avoir une origine analogue.
In Sperber's work we can find a curious kol bo ('a hold-all') of
every kind of traditions, a 'mixtum compositum', including
Babylonian with Yemenite vocalizations, Babylonian-Tiberian with
Tiberian, Eastern with Western traditions, printed books with
manuscripts, Polyglot Bibles with the Genizah fragments.
When Sperber finished his work, and after many years in search of
a publisher for his Aramaic Bible (a work which took forty years), he
could not find one. At that time, on invitation from the Spanish
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, he visited Barcelona,
when A. Diez Macho was looking for Aramaic manuscripts for the
Third Spanish Polyglot Bible, the Madrid Polyglot. When he spoke
with Diez Macho about the new project, Sperber realized that his
Aramaic Bible was already old-fashioned and outdated, because Diez
Macho showed him the genuine Babylonian manuscripts found at the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where Sperber was the
Director of the library. Sperber gave his edition to the Spanish
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas since he had no hope
of finding a publisher, and because the new discoveries of the
Babylonian MSS had made his work obsolete even before it was
printed.
After some years he found a publisher in E.J. Brill (Leiden).
Sperber then asked for the return of his work which he had given to
the Spanish Consejo Superior and it was duly printed by Brill.
I begin by looking at Sperber's work on Targum Onqelos of the
Pentateuch. Sperber seems to have checked the Babylonian MSS kept
in the Jewish Theological Seminary after his journey to Spain, but it
was too late to begin his work again since he was old, and the task was
too hard. He also recognized the excellent MS Vat. 448 for Targum
Onqelos. Therefore he decided to give some hints in the Prologue of
the first volume of his work The Bible in Aramaic, as a justification:
Part of a page of this manuscript appears in photographic reproduction in
E. Tisserant's Specimina Codicum Orientalium, Bonn 1914, as plate 4. A
trained eye can discover even on this facsimile the traces of erasures etc.,
by means of which the changes in the vocalization were affected. It is