Between Holy Writ and Oral Tora

Abstract

Rabbinic views on scriptural translation vary according to provenance, period and purpose—rather than being uniform and monolithic. The existence of variation which I will argue here does not come as a surprise against the background, detailed in the chapters above, of varied ideas about language use, the rising prominence of Hebrew, a difference in translational terminology and a variety of practices in chanting the Scriptures. The differences in the rabbinic views on translation relate to an opposition to Aramaic scriptural translations among Palestinian rabbis, a rising wariness of written Greek versions among many rabbis, the promulgation of the Targums as Oral Tora and, finally, the standardization of Aramaic translations in Babylonia. But these differences are most palpable in the rabbinic reminiscences of their status as Oral Tora. In this chapter I will focus on the orality of the translations—when, how and why the rabbis were promoting the cause of Targums as Oral Tora while divorcing targum from the Holy Writ. To understand the perspective on targum in early rabbinic documents, I will first provide a brief and generic introduction about the necessarily oral aspects of rabbinic culture before I focus on targum as Oral Tora. Among these aspects, the variety and tension between fixed and fluid compositions will receive special attention. Next I will turn to the perspective on targum as Holy Writ, which is all but lost in contemporary scholarship, because it sheds a contrastive light on the boundaries of the Oral Tora and the Written Tora and ultimately on the reasons for the ideas on targumic orality which the rabbinic documents project.