The Targums within a New Description of Jewish Text Structures in Antiquity

Abstract

In 2007, the four contributors to this volume started collaborating on a major research project to investigate the literary features of all ancient Jewish texts outside the Hebrew Bible, insofar as they are anonymous or pseudepigraphic.1 The corpus thus described contains basically every complete text from the earliest extra-canonical Jewish works to the end of the Talmud without a conventional ‘author’. The Project corpus thus encompasses many texts counted among the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha of the Old Testament, the most substantial Dead Sea Scrolls (despite none of them being complete) and the whole of rabbinic literature. We felt that three things were missing from much of the current discussion of these texts: (a) a methodology for giving due attention to the literary features of the works, in the finally redacted shape they have in the best manuscripts; (b) a systematic conceptual framework and terminology for defining their concrete literary features; (c) and a unifying perspective that looks at them all together as literary phenomena,