The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

ALEXANDER SPERBER AND THE STUDY OF THE TARGUMS
Robert P. Gordon
I
Alexander Sperber applied his scholarly energies in two main directions,
viz. historical Hebrew grammar 1 and the study of the Targums.
He also wrote on the Septuagint 2 and, insofar as it related to targumic
issues, the Peshitta, 3 but these are mere opuscula by comparison. His
work on the Targums, which is what concerns us here, is represented
almost entirely in the five volumes of The Bible in Aramaic. Most of
his several shorter discussions published elsewhere are subsumed in
these volumes and especially in the last of them (IVB), subtitled The
Targum and the Hebrew Bible, published posthumously in 1973.
Sperber did not live long enough to produce the index volume to
which he refers in this last volume (pp. 4, 9). His editions of the
'Babylonian' Targums to the Pentateuch and Prophets were welcomed
as fulfilling a long-felt need, but they soon came under critical fire as
certain deficiencies became apparent. At this stage it is enough to say
that if some cannot do with Sperber, few of us can do without him.
That The Bible in Aramaic is very largely the work of the younger
Sperber, when he was in his late twenties and thirties, 4 is clear from
his own account of the project. Much of it was completed before his
1. See his A Historical Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (Leiden: Brill, 1966),
where others of his publications of Hebrew grammar are noted (p. vii).
2. Cf. in particular Septuaginta-Probleme, I (BWANT 3.13; Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1929).
3. 'Peschitta und Onkelos', in S.W. Baron and A. Marx (eds.), Jewish Studies
in Memory of George A. Kohut 1874-1933 (New York: Alexander Kohut Memorial
Foundation, 1935), pp. 554-64.
4. A point stressed by A. Diez Macho in his review of vol. IVB of The Bible in
Aramaic, in JSJ 6 (1975), p. 217.