The Qumran Targum of Job as a Window into Second Temple Judaism: A Response to Randall Buth’s “Where Is the Aramaic Bible at Qumran? Scripture Use in the Land of Israel”

Having recently studied the Qumran Targum of Job, I was especially interested in Randall Buth’s recent article on the relative lack of targums at Qumran. I would like to thank Buth for bringing this important topic to the website. Finding myself at odds with his conclusions, however, I feel a response is in order. I would like to suggest a different reading of the evidence of Qumran and its implications for the language of the larger Palestinian Jewish reading public. My own conclusions are very different from Buth’s, and I think that it is the question of a starting point that makes the difference.

Before drawing conclusions from the relative lack of targums at Qumran, one needs to appreciate the special circumstances represented by Qumran’s outlook on Hebrew and Aramaic. If the Qumran community was as averse to clothing its religiosity in Aramaic as recent scholarship has argued, then it would be wrong to draw a negative conclusion about the use of Aramaic beyond Qumran based on what we find (and do not find) at Qumran.^[17] In other words, asking “Where is the Aramaic Bible at Qumran?” might be like asking “Where is the lunch meat in a vegetarian’s refrigerator?” The fact that a number of Aramaic texts were found at Qumran does not substantially alter this picture, except that we are then forced to say that the Qumranites did not look upon Aramaic as religiously evil per se, but only as an inadequacy for true piety and communion with God.

Given the pivotal role of targumic practice within the argument against a Hebrew vernacular, it is not surprising that the Qumran Targum of Job has become a storm center in the debate over the principal language(s) of Jewish Palestine. Scholars who believe that Hebrew was the vernacular language typically object to the use of this particular targum as evidence for the linguistic situation in Palestine. They emphasize that the targum of Job is just one targum, representing only one book of the Bible. “Where are all the other targums?” they ask. This tactic effectively turns the Targum of Job’s role in the argument for an early targumic corpus on its head: rather than try to explain the existence of this targum, scholars are now forced to explain the sparseness of the Qumran targumic library. Although this is an argument from silence, one cannot simply say that, for that reason, it fails to be probative: for a corpus of writings as large as that found at Qumran, a properly constructed argument from silence can indeed be probative to some extent.

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• ^[1] Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (SBT 26; London: SCM, 1959), 31. ↩
• ^[2] Abraham Berliner, Targum Onkelos: Einleitung in das Targum (Berlin: Gorzelanczyk, 1884), 90; Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (Library of Ancient Israel; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 154. As Joseph A. Fitzmyer writes, "[W]as the Hebrew text of Job so difficult even for this community of Jews that it had to have recourse to it in an Aramaic verison [sic]? Such a question is not easily answered. It is further complicated by the issue raised by Stanislav Segert, who thinks that the Aramaic texts found at Qumran were really non-Essene compositions, produced elsewhere and brought into the community, in which they were merely read or used by members who otherwise spoke and wrote in Hebrew" ("Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," CBQ 36 [1974]: 503-524, esp. 511). See Stanislav Segert, "Sprachliche Bemerkungen zu einigen aramaischen Texten von Qumran," Archiv Orientalni 33 (1965): 190-206. ↩
• ^[3] Roger Le Deaut writes, in response to Berliner, "[I]t should not be forgotten that there is a tradition attributing the composition of the book to Moses himself (b. Bath. 14^b). The esteem accorded to this book might thus have contributed to the production of the Aramaic version" ("The Targumim," in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 2: The Hellenistic Age [eds. W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 563-590, 571). See J. P. M. van der Ploeg, A. S. van der Woude, and B. Jongeling (eds.), Le Targum de Job de la Grotte 11 de Qumran (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen; Leiden: Brill, 1971), 6. ↩
• ^[4] See E. W. Tuinstra, Hermeneutische Aspecten van de Targum van Job uit Grot XI van Qumran (Th.D. dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen, 1970), 69-70. Fitzmyer writes, "The evidence cited in support of [Tuinstra's reasoning] is so slight that it is not convincing" ("Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," 512). ↩
• ^[5] See Fitzmyer, "Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," 523-524. ↩
• ^[6] See Roger Le Deaut, Introduction a la Litterature Targumique (Rome: Insittut Biblique Pontifical, 1966), 68-70. ↩
• ^[7] Fitzmyer writes that Gamliel's reaction against the Job Targum "probably should...be explained as part of the general early prohibition of 'writing down' what was normally transmitted by oral tradition" ("Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," 515 n. 49). ↩
• ^[8] "Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," 516. ↩
• ^[9] See Philip S. Alexander's discussion of literal versus paraphrastic targums ("The Targumim and the Rabbinic Rules for the Delivery of the Targum," in Congress Volume: Salamanca 1983 [VTSup 36; ed. J.A. Emerson; Leiden: Brill, 1985], 14-28, esp. 14-15). ↩
• ^[10] See Le Deaut, "The Targumim," 588. ↩
• ^[11] See Fitzmyer, "Some Observations on the Targum of Job from Qumran Cave 11," 517-518, 522. As Alexander writes, "It is...possible that [the targums'] extremely reverential tone and elaborate anti-anthropomorphism reflect their liturgical setting, and spring from a desire to avoid expressions that could be misunderstood by the uninstructed. The frequent and often startling anthropomorphisms of the Talmud stand in striking contrast" ("The Targumim and the Rabbinic Rules for the Delivery of the Targum," 27). Depending on where one places Targum Onkelos, these talmudic anthropomorphisms do not necessarily represent the academy's lower criteriology of discourse: rather, they may reflect a new openness toward mystical speculation in Babylonia. J. Courtenay James, writing long before the Qumranic targums were known, correctly notes that the avoidance of anthropomorphisms in Targum Onkelos cannot be used as a basis for dating the writing (The Language of Palestine and Adjacent Regions [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920], 251). On the targums' avoidance of anthropomorphisms and other challenges to God's transcendence, see Le Deaut, "The Targumim," 586-587. Andre Paul writes, "La traduction des textes sacres a toujours ete une question grave pour les juifs, surtout les juifs anciens. Traduire est de soi une impiete: c'est en effet toucher, en surface comme en profondeur, au texte divin et donc risquer de le transformer, souiller et profaner. Les juifs de l'Antiquite repugnaient volontiers a traduire l'Ecriture tout comme ils s'interdisaient toute representation divine, plastique mais aussi linguistique: le nom de Yahve, on le sait, n'etait ni ecrit ni meme prononce" ("La Bible grecque d'Aquila et l'ideologie du judaisme ancien," ANRW 2.20.1 [1987]: 221-245, esp. 230-231). ↩
• ^[12] After first offering an unconvincing explanation for Gamliel's action (viz., that "it was not part of the lectionary cycle and therefore would cause people in their private reading of it to neglect the house of study"), Steven Fraade "alternatively" suggests that Gamliel "might have had it removed since it was a defective or unapproved translation" ("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- 286, esp. 256). See Alexander, "The Targumim and the Rabbinic Rules for the Delivery of the Targum," 25-26. Alexander writes, "Normally,...censure appears to have been in the hands of the congregation" (ibid, 26). ↩
• ^[13] There is a possible ideological contact between the Job targum and the Qumran community in the use of "plantation" in 11QtgJob 35.10. As van der Ploeg, van der Woude, and Jongeling note, however, the source of the term in 11QtgJob is probably the biblical Psalms (Le Targum de Job de la Grotte XI de Qumran, 6). ↩
• ^[14] Takamitsu Muraoka, "The Aramaic of the Old Targum of Job from Qumran Cave XI," JJS 25 (1974): 425-443; idem, "Notes on the Old Targum of Job from Qumran Cave XI," RevQ 9 (1977): 117-125. But cf. Kutscher's explanation for the presence of "eastern" vocabulary in the Genesis Apocryphon: "The centre of the Persian empire being in the east, including the territory that was to become the domain of the (later) Eastern Aramaic, it was only natural that especially in the lexical field the 'Reichsaramaisch' should be coloured by the eastern dialects" ("The Language of the 'Genesis Apocryphon,'" 14). "Reichsaramaisch" is the designation most scholars use for the language of the Qumran Targum of Job. See A. Diez Macho, El Targum: Introduccion a las traducciones aramaicas de la Biblia (Barcelona: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas, 1972), 41-42. ↩
• ^[15] Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel (SNTSMS 102; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33-34. ↩
• ^[16] The reader who is interested in this issue owes it to himself/herself to read Catherine Hezser's persuasive revisionist account in Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (TSAJ 81; Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001). ↩
• ^[17] See Emile Puech, “Du Bilinguisme a Qumran?,” in Mosaique de Langues, Mosaique Culturelle: Le Bilinguisme dans le Proche-Orient Ancient: Actes de la Table-Ronde du 18 novembre 1995 organisee par l’URA 1062 “Etudes Semitiques” (ed. Francoise Briquel-Chatonnet; Antiquites Semitiques 1; Paris: Jean Maisonneuve, 1996), 171-189; Stanislav Segert, “Hebrew Essenes-Aramaic Christians,” in Mogilany 1995: Papers on the Dead Sea Scrolls Offered in Memory of Aleksy Klawek (ed. Zdzislaw J. Kapera; Krakow: Enigma, 1998), 169-184; William M. Schniedewind, “Qumran Hebrew as an Antilanguage,” JBL 118 (1999): 235-252; Steven Weitzman, “Why Did the Qumran Community Write in Hebrew?,” JAOS 119 (1999): 35-45; John C. Poirier, “4Q464: Not Eschatological,” RevQ 20/4 (2002): 583-587. ↩