The Targums: A Critical Introduction

16. Ancient Scripture Translations

339 16 Ancient Scripture Translations In addition to the Targums, the Hebrew Bible was translated at least six times in antiquity,1 sometimes paired with the New Testament as “the Old Testament.” The eastern Mediterranean provided the crucible for this linguistic activity. Among Aramaic speakers, evidence from Qumran shows that Jews translated the book of Job and other Hebrew Bible books into Jewish Literary Aramaic; Samaritans translated their Pentateuch into Samaritan Aramaic; Judean Christians translated the Old and New Testaments into Christian Palestinian Aramaic; and Syrian Christians translated the Christian Bible into the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Jews also translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, a translation known as the Septuagint that spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and became Christianity’s first Bible. Later, at the end of the fourth century, Jerome came to Palestine, where he learned Hebrew and made the Latin translation known as the Vulgate. For all this wealth of these translations, for much of antiquity, sacred texts simply were not translated, so that the cases of Judaism and Christianity are rather exceptional. In most religions, only prophets, priests, scribes, and other specialists needed direct knowledge of their sacred texts. Those who needed to read them were trained to read, and if the text was in a language they did not know, they were taught that language. So when the first books of the Septuagint were translated during the third century BCE, that undertaking was unusual, so odd that a Greek Jew named Aristeas felt compelled to tell a story of how the translation had been accomplished by seventy-two of the most learned scholars from the Jerusalem temple who had been brought to Egypt for the purpose.2 Despite this 1 Unless otherwise indicated, the translations in this chapter are our own. 2 The Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates. For a modern translation and introduction, see 340 — The Targums: A Critical Introduction endorsement, the Septuagint’s differences from the Hebrew text remained so controversial in the first century CE that another scholarly Egyptian Jew, Philo Judaeus, retold Aristeas’ story, presenting the translation as the product of divine inspiration rather than of human intellect. As discussed in chapter 2 of this volume, translations are caught between the Scylla of faithfulness to the source text and the Charybdis of intelligibility of the translated text in the target language. An Italian adage has it that traduttore, traditore, “to translate is to betray.” A translator makes the brave choice to collate commitment to the original text with comprehension on the part of the hearer or reader. Translators also observed cultural factors in choosing between the two. In legal texts, exact wording was important, and so they were usually rendered in a highly literal manner; if the meaning of the translation was unclear, the court could be expected to provide a source-language expert to interpret.3 For other kinds of texts—letters, stories, and instructions—meaning was more important than the original wording, and so translators took steps to make that meaning clear. In some ways translators should be considered craftsmen. They did what they were expected to do—i.e., translate—and they did it well. They did not theorize in public prior to their translation, nor did they lay out elaborate explanations of what they thought they were doing, as commonly happens today. Latin translators such as Cicero and Jerome occasionally remarked on the nature of translating or the character of translation types, but their comments were unusual, and for that reason remarkable. No one who translated into Aramaic left a reflective comment about the intent or purpose of translating. Although some rabbis mentioned different approaches to translating with the apparent purpose of condemning them (see chapter 14), there is no indication that those issuing the derisive remarks had ever done any translating themselves. The goal of this chapter is to understand how the translations mentioned above balanced the concerns of providing a faithful rendering of the original text and those of making the translation understandable in the target language. What strategies did the translators use that we can see in the translations itself? For Targums, these strategies are inherent in the definition of chapter 2. That definition, we recall, emphasized literal rendering of the original combined with non-literal additions: Schutt, “Letter of Aristeas.” For Philo’s version of the story, see his Life of Moses (Vita Moses), 2:25–44. For text and translation, see Colson and Whitaker, Philo. 3 Brock, “Aspects of Translation Technique in...