The Targums: A Critical Introduction

9. Dating the Targums of Israel

151 Paul Kahle’s 1930 publication of fragmentary manuscripts of Palestinian Targums from the Cairo Genizah inaugurated a new era in the study of the Pentateuchal Targums. In part, this was because the fragments were the earliest known examples of the Palestinian Targums and revealed important similarities to, as well as differences from, already accessible exemplars of the Palestinian Targums. Kahle argued that these manuscripts were important not only for studying ancient Judaism but because they revealed the language which Jesus spoke. He contended further that the interpretative traditions contained in these Targums provided some of the foundations of biblical exegesis for the early Christian church. From this perspective, the Palestinian Targums—and the Cairo Genizah fragments in particular—preserved interpretations of the Hebrew Bible from the first century and before. These would have been known to the Christian converts who allegedly wove them into earliest Christian theology. In Kahle’s view, it was necessary to analyze the Targums in order to understand the genesis of this new religion. This view was taken up by Kahle’s students and other members of what came to be known as the “Kahle School”—influential scholars such as Alejandro Díez Macho, Martin McNamara, Roger Le Déaut, Matthew Black, Michael Maher, and Pierre Grelot. When Alejandro Díez Macho announced the discovery of a complete manuscript of the Palestinian Targum—Targum Neofiti—in 1956, the few accidentally preserved expansions of the Palestinian Targums known from the Cairo Genizah fragments suddenly became an entire Pentateuch’s worth of expansions. Kahle also laid the foundation for understanding their importance. For the next two decades, Díez Macho and his colleagues argued that all the Palestinian Targums—at that time including Targum Pseudo-Jonathan as well as Targum Neofiti—were pre-Christian and on that basis used 9 Dating the Targums of Israel 152 — The Targums: A Critical Introduction them to explicate the foundation of Christian biblical interpretation and theology. Yet cracks in the edifice of the Targums’ early dating quickly appeared. In 1962 P. Wernberg-Møller demonstrated the unreliability of the “textcritical method” for determining the pre-Christian character of Neofiti and the other Palestinian Targums, which Díez Macho had termed the “surest way” of demonstrating TN’s early character. A few years later in 1974, Anthony D. York published his pivotal essay “The Dating of Targumic Literature.”1 This piece looked at each of the nine main arguments for the early dating of the Palestinian Targums propounded by Díez Macho, Le Déaut, and others. York conclusively showed that none of the arguments successfully supported the early nature of these Targums, either alone or in association with others. We will discuss some of these later in this chapter. Although the implications of York’s essay took some time to be absorbed by the field, it effectively knocked the legs out from under those wishing to date the Palestinian Targums to the first century or earlier. In the aftermath, the tide of scholarly opinion shifted from viewing PseudoJonathan as containing some of the earliest interpretations—Kahle and others had interpreted Deuteronomy 33:11 not only as referring to the Hasmonean King John Hyrcanus (143–104 BCE) but as formulated during his reign—to understanding it as containing some of the latest.2 In line with the position of the nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz, Avigdor Shinan held that Pseudo-Jonathan was created in the seventh or eighth century CE, while D. J. Splansky held out for a late ninthcentury date.3 While there is little agreement on specifics, as M. Maher points out in his introduction in the Aramaic Bible series, most scholars focused on the Islamic period.4 Robert Hayward, Paul Flesher, and Beverly Mortensen remain some of the few scholars who continue to understand Pseudo-Jonathan as deriving from the rabbinic period, arguing for a late fourth or early fifth-century date.5 By contrast, little attention has 1 See Wernberg-Møller, “Prolegomena to a Re-Examination”; “Inquiry into the Validity ”; and “Some Observations on the Relationship.” 2 York, “Dating of Targumic Literature,” 53. Kahle, Cairo Geniza, 202. 3 Avigdor Shinan took this position in the published version of his doctoral dissertation and has argued it in several articles since that time. See Shinan, Aggadah in the Aramaic Targums, 1:119–46; Shinan, “The ‘Palestinian’ Targums,” “Live Translation,” and “Dating Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.” For Donald Splansky’s arguments, see “Targum PseudoJonathan ,” 99–105. 4 Maher, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan...