The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

GORDON Alexander Sperber and the Study of the Targums 97
The problem was that he was not nearly strict enough in his
application of his own insights and, though he did not create the
problem of the widespread misuse of Targum for retroversive
purposes, he became an unintentionally generous subscriber through
his participation in BH^.
Ill
From the beginning Sperber was convinced that the production of
editions of the 'Babylonian' Targums would assist in the recovery of
the pristine Targum text, and for this purpose the variants in his main
apparatuses were regarded as crucially important. In this connection
his firm demarcation between Targum as institution and Targum as a
literary document is illuminating. 21 He doubtless exaggerated the difference
and the time-gap—at least 1,200 years, in his opinion—but as
a result we are able to appreciate just how Lagardian (in matters targumic!)
was his approach. 'Targum' was about texts in transmission,
and the recovery of the Urtext the simple and legitimate goal of the
targumist. In his earliest articles, published in 1926 and 1927, Sperber
notes a feature of Targum which is diffused throughout the
manuscript tradition, the recognition of which would, as he thought,
help uncover the original text. 22 With the decline of Aramaic as a
spoken language and the increasing authority of the biblical text a
'Hebraizing' of the Targums occurred, resulting in a series of minor
caiques. It followed, therefore, that, where there are two readings, the
grammatically correct one is original. 23 The aim was to create 'a
grammatically correct Targum'. 24 However, Sperber's criterion is far
from sufficient to deal with the range of variants within the
manuscripts which he himself edited. Moreover, its inadequacy in
special circumstances may be illustrated from Nah. 1.9 where the
shorter text of the Antwerp Polyglot is the grammatically correct one,
yet the absence of three words and the modification of a fourth would
accord well with the abridgment policy at work elsewhere in the
21. The Bible in Aramaic, IVB, p. 2.
22. 'Zur Textgestalt des Prophetentargums', ZAW 44 (1926), pp. 175-76; 'Zur
Sprache des Prophetentargums', ZAW 45 (1927), pp. 267-88 (272-81); cf. The
Bible in Aramaic, IVB, pp. 28-29.
23. 'Sprache', p. 281.
24. The Bible in Aramaic, IVB, p. 30.