The Watchers in Jewish and Christian Traditions:

14 The Watchers Traditions in Targum and Midrash

14 The Watchers Traditions in Targum and Midrash Joshua Ezra Burns Evidence for the Jewish reception of the Watchers traditions between the Second Temple period and late antiquity is fairly limited. A number of narrative and exegetical motifs relating to the legend of the fallen angels appear as glosses on the text of Genesis in the targumim (singular targum), the ancient Jewish translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into the Aramaic language.1 Traces of the legend also appear sporadically in the classical Midrash and the Babylonian Talmud, works normally ascribed to the rabbinic sages of late ancient Palestine and Babylonia. The appearance in these treatises of themes drawn from the Book of the Watchers or related traditions naturally suggests that their authors knew of those materials, if not necessarily in the forms preserved in 1 Enoch. Yet the impression of their cultural currency in Jewish circles is offset by the fact that the very sources attesting to their reception speak to controversy over their transmission. In what follows, I will present the relevant textual witnesses while attempting to plot their respective positions amid a tableau of evolving Jewish sensibilities regarding the authenticity of the Enochic pseudepigrapha. 1. All targumic readings employed in this study are based on the texts compiled by the contributors to The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, ed. Stephen A. Kaufman (database online at http://cal1.cn.huc.edu). For complete bibliography, see http://cal.huc.edu/searching/targum_info.html. Corresponding English translations and comments on the relevant passages appear in Bernard Grossfeld, Targum Onqelos to Genesis, Aramaic Bible 6 (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1988), 51–53; Martin McNamara, Targum Neofiti 1: Genesis, Aramaic Bible 1a (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 70–72; and Michael Maher, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis, Aramaic Bible 1b (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 36–38. For the Peshitta, see The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Peshitta Version, vol. I.1: Preface, Genesis-Exodus, ed. T. Jansma and M.D. Koster et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 9–10. 199 Authors and Audiences Before delving into the texts under consideration, it will be instructive to discuss the relationship between the literary genres of targum and midrash. Until recently, scholars generally assumed that the targumim derived from the same sources as the great works of rabbinic scriptural exegesis, that is, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the classical Midrash. The literature of the early rabbinic sages abounds in testimony to their use of Aramaic scriptural translations in a variety of pedagogical and ritual contexts as early as the first century ce.2 That the actual examples of such literature traditionally ascribed to those sages were products of their own textual practices was, to many, a foregone conclusion. Recent studies, however, have led to comprehensive shift in critical opinion about the varied origins of the surviving targumim and their places in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation.3 Consequently, the apparent affinities between targumic exegesis and rabbinic exegesis are no longer considered proof of their common provenance. The targumic treatises commonly associated with the rabbis are today widely acknowledged to have been written long after they introduced the practice of targum to their discipline. These texts, moreover, have been shown to incorporate diverse assumptions, techniques, and literary motifs locating their respective origins alternatively within and without the cultural compass of the rabbinic movement.4 Whatever remains, therefore, of the translations produced and/or utilized by the early rabbinic sages is difficult to discern beneath the innumerable layers of exegetical accumulation beneath the surfaces of the targumim.5 2. On the rabbinic witnesses to the practice of targum, see Steven D. Fraade, “Rabbinic Views on the Practice of Targum, and Multilingualism in the Jewish Galilee of the Third–Sixth Centuries,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 253–86; Willem F. Smelik, “The Rabbinic Reception of Early Bible Translations as Holy Writings and Oral Torah,” Journal for the Aramaic Bible 1 (1999): 249–72. 3. For the following, see Philip S. Alexander, “Jewish Aramaic Translations of Hebrew Scriptures,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, CRINT 2.1, ed. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1988), 217–53. 4. See Avigdor Shinan, “Sermons, Targums, and the Reading from Scriptures in the Ancient Synagogue,” in The Synagogue in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (Philadelphia: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1987), 97–110; Shinan, “The Aramaic...