In my forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, June 2023), I explore the practice and conception of multilingualism and translation in ancient Judaism. Interrogating the deep and dialectical relationship between them, I situate representative scriptural, rabbinic, and other texts within their broader Greco-Roman context, as well as within the cross-temporal history of Judaism, all the while in dialogue with the yet broader academic study and theorization of multilingualism and translation. Neither claiming to be systematic nor comprehensive, my selections of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek primary sources fluently translated into clear English alongside their original-language texts (thereby practicing, I hope, what I preach), illustrate the fundamental issues and the performative aspects relating to multilingualism and translation, especially as manifested through socio-linguistic code-switching and multilingual language choice. These are profoundly rich texts that have largely been ignored in the broader history of both multilingualism and translation, both ancient and beyond. In these chapter-length essays, I critically scrutinize and analyze a wide range of texts to reveal the inner dynamics and the pedagogical-rhetorical implications that are disclosed when multilingualism and translation are paired in close reading. My book demonstrates the need for a more thorough and integrated treatment of these topics, and their relevance to the study of ancient Judaism, in particular, than has been heretofore recognized.
My interest in multilingualism probably traces, subconsciously at least, to having been raised in a bi-lingual German-English family (not to mention Hebrew school three days a week). I studied French through high school and college and got to use it in France during the summer of 1969. After graduating from college (1970), I lived for four years in Israel, where I acquired fluency in modern Hebrew.
My fascination with the relation between Hebrew and Aramaic, and its public and private performativity as targum, traces back to my doctoral studies in the mid- to late-1970s at the University of Pennsylvania, where incidentally I paid my way by teaching biblical and modern Hebrew. I was increasingly drawn to targum as an understudied aspect of rabbinic scriptural reading and interpretation (and its relation to midrash as commentary), as to other ancient scriptural translations (e.g., the Septuagint in Greek and the Peshiṭta in Syriac) as both textual witnesses and deeply exegetical exercises, manifestly evidenced in my Ph.D. dissertation (1980) and first book, Enosh and His Generation (1984). Incidentally, at Yale I chaired the university’s Language Study Committee for seven years, enabling me to view my own fascination with targum as a two-way interface between Hebrew and Aramaic in broader pedagogical perspective. My first substantial publication on the subject of targum came in 1992 (“Rabbinic Views on the Practice of Targum”). In that article I began to expand my focus in four distinct but intersecting ways, as evidenced in many lectures, seminars, and articles (two of which were published in both English and Hebrew), culminating in the present book: performativity, multilingualism, inscriptions, and eclectic use of socio-linguistic and translation theory. Let me briefly explain each.
By performativity I mean that the ancient texts I examine do not just say something, but do something with respect to their intended readers/auditors, that is usually related to conferred identity or self-identification, whether as individual or collective subjects. The rabbinic texts I examine are both about performance and performances in their own rights. I argued this for scriptural commentary (midrash), a related form to targum, at greater length and acknowledgement of my intellectual influencers in the introductory chapter of my second book, From Tradition to Commentary (1991).
It became increasingly clear to me that ancient scriptural translation had to viewed within the context of a multilingual culture and society. In other words, what work does scriptural translation perform in such a multilingual environment? In short, targum is intended, at least partly, for those with varying degrees of literacy in both Hebrew and Aramaic. Most importantly, among Jews, it never displaced (quote the opposite!) the written Holy Hebrew text that it interpretatively accompanied, as happens eventually with the status of the Septuagint in later Christianity, with some notable exceptions.
Although the present book focuses mainly on literary texts, a previous article, “Language Mix and Multilingualism in Ancient Palestine: Literary and Inscriptional Evidence” (2012), simultaneously published in Israel in Hebrew, explored the rich inscriptional evidence for widespread multilingualism in ancient Syro-Palestine in particular (but also in Dura Europos), as it would have been visually encountered, whether in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, often in combination with one another (code-switching). For references to the actual inscriptions, many of them displaying code-switching, see the aforesaid article as well as Chapter One of this book, especially notes 18–21.
Finally, while working on this book, I read expansively (and organized an interdisciplinary faculty study group at Yale), on comparative and theoretical approaches to both multilingualism and translation, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and their mutual dependencies. The ones whom I cite most frequently are Walter Benjamin (“The Task of the Translator”) and George Steiner (After Babel), to whom the subtitle of this book playfully, but respectfully, alludes.
Chapter Overview
In Chapter One, I provide a methodological and historical introduction, defining the terms of analysis and highlighting the richness of multilingualism, in a variety of visual media, in the ancient world, both Jewish and non-Jewish, that is, in the surrounding “neighborhood.”
In Chapter Two, I examine ancient understandings of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, focusing on those that presume or argue for the existence of an originary multilingualism (rather than unilingualism) already prior to the “confusion of languages” that is thought to have begun with the dispersion of the nations and their national languages according to the biblical story of linguistic origins. Multilingualism is thereby elevated rather then deprecated, a blessing rather than a curse.
In Chapter Three, I uncover the rich variety of early rabbinic interpretations of the mishnaic claim that the writing of the Torah, upon the Israelites’ entering of the Land, “most distinctly” (according to Deuteronomy 27:8), refers to its having been incised on stones in “seventy languages,” seventy being the total number of human nations (according to Genesis 10) and, by extension, languages. What was the nature and function of such revelatory multilingualism?
In Chapter Four, I discuss the biblical figure of Ezra, the priest and scribe, who is associated not only with restoring the Hebrew text (and writing) of the Torah after a lengthy lapse, but with the translation of the Hebrew of that sacred text into the cognate language of Aramaic, which began as the Persian empire’s transactional lingua franca, but which became a vernacular Jewish (and non-Jewish) language by the end of the first millennium B.C.E.
In Chapter Five, I focus on a mishnaic passage, and its derivatives, that takes up the relative status of texts of Scripture in the “holy tongue,” that are publicly and liturgically read, in comparison with scriptural texts of translation, whether into “any language,” Greek, or Aramaic. Thus, can one violate the Sabbath in order to rescue such scriptural texts in translation from a burning building, as can be done for “holy writings” in Hebrew, and how are they to be disposed of when removed from circulation? A double “historical” anecdote is cited with respect to the status of the targum (Aramaic translation) of the book of Job, from among the Writings and not publicly read.
In Chapter Six, I begin with an early midrashic interpretation of the king’s Torah of Deuteronomy 17: 19 to mean that “reading leads to translation (targum),” taken to allude to the interlinear (or interversal) recitation of each (written) verse of the Torah in Hebrew immediately following by the (oral) rendering of the same verse in Aramaic, presuming a bilingual (to whatever extent) setting for such a “bi-text,” and demonstrating what I argue is a form of socio-linguistic code-switching. In other words, reading and translation are mutually interdependent and -reflective. I argue the same from similar passages in other rabbinic texts, an extended analysis of a specific targumic example, and a brief history of such interversal scribal formats from the Cairo Geniza to medieval European Bible manuscripts. This practice had dual performative and pedagogic functions, both in public (synagogue) and private (one’s home or study house) recitation and study.
In Chapter Seven, I begin with a relatively late midrashic text that expresses a deep, foreboding anxiety that were the rabbinic oral Torah written down and translated into Greek, at first for Hellenistic Jews and later for Western Christians, this would erode the Jews’ self-perception as God’s uniquely favored people, alone in possession of his esoteric oral Torah (mishnah). This results in a retrospective view of the origin stories of the translation of the Torah into Greek (the Septuagint), for Jewish use, beginning in the mid-third century B.C.E. in Alexandria Egypt, with the Letter of Aristeas a century later, and enunciated by Philo of Alexander in the first century C. E. Against these highly positive views of this first scriptural translation, as if achieved under imperial authorization, popular acclaim, and divine providence, I turn to deeply ambivalent (positive and negative) early rabbinic views of the Greek language (not to mention wisdom). For example, should Greek be used in Jewish prayer or in educating one’s children? The chapter concludes by seeking to understand how such diverse and deeply contradictory attitudes might be comparatively and contextually understood, if not reconciled.
In Chapter Eight, I conclude our textual tours with an afterword that suggests that the diverse templates of multilingualism and translation in ancient Judaism continue to be dynamically adopted and adapted through the diverse chronological and geographic history of Jewish cultures down to the present day. In short, Jewish history is, as much as anything, the history of Jewish multilingualism and translation, with the Jews being a people of translation.
The book includes a full bibliography and set of indices (ancient sources, modern scholars, and subjects).