Rabbinization and Targumic Literature: Steps Towards a Historically Oriented Paradigm for the Study of Targum

This essay examines how targumic literature sheds light on the process of rabbinization. It organizes our extant targums, Jewish Aramaic Bible translations, into three contiguous periods and argues that each successive chronological layer of targum depicts a translational literature more aware of rabbinic titles, institutions and practices than the one that preceded it. This essay also begins the process of developing a historically oriented methodological paradigm for the study of targumic literature. It encourages scholarship on targum to resist the seemingly natural tendency to conflate the aims, agendas and authorizing agents of rabbinic and targumic literatures. Instead, scholarship should view these translations as historical and cultural artifacts of the late ancient and early medieval Jewish societies in which they were produced and during which they circulated - societies that included, but were not necessarily dominated or controlled by, the Judaism of the mishnaic and talmudic rabbis.