Gottlieb, Leeor. Targum Chronicles and Its Place Among the Late Targums. Brill, 2020.
At about $200 per ounce, the Tuber Mangnatum - better known as the Italian White Truffle - costs just under the current price of an ounce of gold. Truffles taste delicious, but their dear value reflects the skill and labor required to discover and harvest them. As of yet, they cannot be mass-produced. Hunters with special truffle-sniffing dogs comb through the floors of certain dense forests after a period of heavy rainfall in order to acquire the treasure they seek. Scholarship can at times resemble such truffle-searching. Leeor Gottlieb’s recent book, Targum Chronicles and its Place Among the Late Targums, demonstrates the meticulous process and delicious products of source hunting. Weighing in at 2lbs 2.2 oz, its price of $231 is a steal - at least when compared to truffles.
As the book’s name implies, Gottlieb offers a detailed study of Targum Chronicles. Targum Chronicles itself combines into one neat package two features: a verse-by-verse Aramaic translation of the Hebrew books of 1-2 Chronicles and an anthology of rabbinic exegesis, mostly from the Babylonian Talmud, on those biblical books. In his 518-page study of this text, Gottlieb develops two major claims. First, he attempts to definitively prove that sometime between the end of the twelfth and the late thirteenth century, a European Jew, who likely lived in Italy, composed this Aramaic edition of Chronicles as a tool for Jewish Bible study. Prior scholarship had, by contrast, dated Targum Chronicles to between the 4th and 8th centuries and set its context as the Land of Israel or its environs.
Gottlieb’s new date and location for Targum Chronicles ties directly into his second major claim. He seeks to reorient the study of Targum, a body of literature that presents much of the Hebrew Bible in Aramaic translation and was thought to have been produced sometime between the first and eighth centuries. Targum, at its core, seems to reflect the fact that Jews translated the Hebrew Bible into their Aramaic vernacular in order to facilitate the study of Scripture and the liturgical reading of the Pentateuch and portions from the Prophets. Indeed, prior scholarship on Targumic literature operated under the assumption that translation always serves the vernacular. Scholars presumed that as the Islamic conquest proceeded and Arabic overtook Aramaic as the lingua franca, the production of Targum must have ceased. After all, why translate into a dead language?
Gottlieb, by contrast, argues for the persistence of a (not really) dead language and an undying genre. The demonstrably late date of Targum Chronicles – and its affinities with the Jewish Aramaic translation of some other biblical books – suggest that some Jews were interested in carrying on a tradition of translation that no longer rendered the text of the Hebrew Bible into their mother tongue. These scholastically minded Jews produced, according to Gottlieb, “the late Targums,” texts influenced by the translations and exegeses of Jews living in late ancient Palestine and Babylonia, but which were composed much later than them and reflect the life experiences and cultures of early medieval Jews.
Gottlieb develops these arguments by painstakingly comparing Targum Chronicles with rabbinic literature and with other Jewish Aramaic Bible translations. He dedicates the first half of his book (pgs. 29-244) to exploring the relationship between Targum Chronicles and other Targums. In chapter two, he argues that Targum Chronicles employs many of the same translational techniques and theological formulations that characterize the genre of Targum as a whole. In other words, the author of Targum Chronicles intended to produce a Targum in order to work within a genre that no longer served its original function.
In chapters three and four, Gottlieb examines how Targum Chronicles manipulated earlier Targums. By comparing Targum Chronicles with parallel portions in Targum Jonathan to Samuel-Kings, Gottlieb argues that the translator of Chronicles used something akin to our extant Aramaic Targum. In some instances, the translator even selected the Aramaic text of the Targum to Samuel-Kings against his source text: the Hebrew Chronicles. But at the same time, Targum Chronicles also freely emended and added to the text of Targum Jonathan, updating it to suit its own concerns and context. Through a series of detailed comparisons, Gottlieb shows us that the act of reception – the intentional use of a prior text – encourages one to delicately balance creativity and constraint when working with a prior tradition. And, more importantly, an author can – and in this case did – vacillate between these two poles within a single work. Older Targums became a source of constraint and new creativity centuries after they were originally composed. By placing the Targums on the Table of Nations (Gen 10) side-by-side with the opening chapters Targum Chronicles, Gottlieb argues that the translator of Chronicles worked with a variety of these early translations and likely even with translations of the Pentateuch currently unavailable to us.
In his fifth chapter, he argues that Targum Chronicles relies directly upon Targum Pseudo-Jonathan – a somewhat wonky translation of the Pentateuch that, according to recent scholarship, was compiled during the twelfth century.[1] Given that the earliest manuscript of Targum Chronicles dates to 1294, Gottlieb surmises that Targum Chronicles was written sometime between the latter part of the twelfth century to the late thirteenth. Internal evidence, such as translations that reflect an Islamic setting and the use of the word “Hungarian,” further furnish Targum Chronicles with a late date. Targum, it appears, remained an active genre, at least for some Jews, well after they abandoned Aramaic as a regularly spoken language. In this sense, the story of Targum mirrors that of other scholastic traditions that perpetuated the translation of dead languages, such as the various Latin translations of the Bible during the Protestant Reformation, intended, it seems, for elite rather than lay use.
Gottlieb then begins the work of building the category of “late Targums.” In his sixth chapter, he compares Targum Psalms with Targum Chronicles and suggests that the linguistic affinities between both Targums may result from the fact that both were produced in a similar setting and location. If correct, Gottlieb has, at the very least, reorganized the study and categorization of Targumic literature. Whereas prior scholars divided Targum into two groups: the Babylonian Targums (Onqelos and Jonathan) and the Palestinian Targums (the remainder), Gottlieb sees three groups, each with distinctive geography, chronology, method, and sitz im leben: the Babylonian Targums, the Palestinian Targums (such as Neofiti and the Fragment Targums), and the late Targums (Pseudo-Jonathan and several of the Targums to the Hagiographa). This pioneering chapter also provides the foundation, method, and opportunity for further study, for carefully examining the relationships of Targums Chronicles and Psalms with other Hagiographical Targums, such as those to Job and Ruth. And perhaps a careful analysis of these texts – written after the Islamic conquest but before the late thirteenth century – might illumine the ideas, cultures, and traditions of a relatively under-documented period of Jewish history.
In the second half of his book (chs. 7-8), Gottlieb compares Targum Chronicles with late ancient rabbinic literature. He examines in detail every single instance in which the Targum includes material that goes beyond mere translation. Of the seventy-six expansions discussed, only twelve seem to come from the mind of the translator. Of the remainder, the vast majority trace back to rabbinic literature - and to the Babylonian Talmud in particular; and sometimes even to a specific textual witness. These expansions showcase Targum Chronicles as a work steeped in a Jewish culture that inherited and championed the mantel of late ancient rabbinic Judaism. Targum Chronicles mentions the Sifra, casts biblical characters as scholars of Torah, and even employs idioms that elsewhere characterize rabbinic legal discourse. In this sense, Targum Chronicles (especially when viewed in comparison with some of the earlier Targums) bears witness to a very late stage of “rabbinization,” the long historical process by which rabbis slowly transformed from a small minority vying with other Jewish groups for authority into a hegemonic force that dominated Jewish life and thought. And given its dependent relationship with Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, a non- or perhaps even anti-rabbinic text, Targum Chronicles may suggest that the process of rabbinization continued well into the thirteenth century in some locations.[2]
At the very least, the expansions within Targum Chronicles shed light on the reception of the Babylonian Talmud, particularly as the primary go-to source for Jewish wisdom. Of the vast collection of prior Jewish literature, the translator of Chronicles – perhaps mirroring or fulfilling the needs of his own scholarly audience – preferred the Babylonian Talmud.
In terms of prose and style, Gottlieb employs a “no stone left unturned” procedure, which leaves a mark in both the text’s form and function. He cites every primary source in full Hebrew, Aramaic, and English. He has also optimized them for visual comparison - a complex feat of typographic layout that involves both wide stretches of white space and, when particularly important, rubrication. For a work rooted in historical philology, the text contains a minimal amount of footnotes. The reason: almost every scrap of detail finds its place within the body of this text. In this way, the book operates in the genre of the biblical commentary, with Targum Chronicles as its subject. And as a consequence, it demands slow and careful reading. Instead of presenting us with summary and samples, Gottlieb walks with us through the intellectual thicket of Targum Chronicles as he locates, uncovers, and gathers that which possesses scholarly value and delight – solid historical conclusions and promising potential research.
A.J. Berkovitz is Assistant Professor of Ancient Judaism at HUC-JIR/New York
[1] See Leeor Gottlieb, “Towards a More Precise Understanding of Pseudo-Jonathan’s Origins” Aramaic Studies 19 (2021): 104-20; Gavin McDowell, “The Date and Provenance of Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: The Evidence of Pirqe deRabbi Eliezer and the Chronicles of Moses,” Aramaic Studies 19 (2021): 121-54.
[2] Compare the recent temporal frame suggested by the newly published book: Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000, eds. Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021).