One factor in the rapid spread of Christianity during the second and third centuries was the belief in monotheism, an idea which, even before Paul, had taken root in many localities. The Roman occupation of the Mediterranean lands and much of the area we now call the Middle East had led to widespread dispersal of populations. Among the many émigrés were Jews who were settling more widely across the region. Their monotheistic beliefs began to resonate among those they came into contact with. And although the people the Jews settled among were not thrilled by the idea of taking on the rigours of the Mosaic religion, they were attracted to the idea of a single God instead of the local deities they had worshipped for generations. They were ready for a monotheistic faith and they bought into the beliefs, if not the daily practices, of Judaism. The Jews called these people ‘fearers of heaven’.2 They, and many of the Jews who lived among them, were the earliest communities to accept the message of Christianity, the new faith which offered monotheistic belief without covenantal stringencies. Edessa in the second century was one of the places where ‘fearers of heaven’ could be found.
During the first century CE Izates, king of neighbouring Adiabene, converted to Judaism, as did his mother Helena, his sons and many of their subjects. The early Jewish law code records gifts sent by Helena to the Jerusalem Temple; among them a golden plaque which bore the biblical injunction against a woman accused by her husband of infidelity.3 It’s not the sort of gift we’d expect a queen to send today.
When one of Izates’s sons became king of Edessa, he encouraged its inhabitants to adopt his Jewish faith, or at least to subscribe to monotheistic principles. By the time the Christian apostle Addai visited Edessa, early in the third century, he found a receptive audience of Jews and ‘fearers of heaven’. Already won over to the belief in one God, they responded to his message with enthusiasm.
They spoke a dialect of Aramaic in Edessa, known today as Syriac. Aramaic and Syriac are Semitic tongues, related to Arabic, Hebrew and the Ethiopian language Amharic. There were once many other languages in the Semitic family, but names like Ugaritic, Akkadian and Phoenician are now only found in universities and history books. Aramaic is still spoken in scattered communities across Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, although there are fears that it will disappear altogether within the course of the next generation.4
It was in Edessa that one of the most intriguing Old Testament translations was composed, one which seems to conceal a devastating and highly charged communal disintegration. The translation itself, as its name implies, is relatively straightforward; it is known as the Peshitta, which means ‘plain’ or ‘simple’, as in the ‘plain’ or ‘simple’ translation. Historians are perplexed by its background, by who translated it, and why. There is a Syriac translation of the New Testament with the same name but the Old and New Testament Peshittas are completely different compositions. It’s the Old Testament version which seems to mask the occurrence of some deeply traumatic events.
Exactly what happened is by no means certain; the background to the composition has been argued over by scholars for decades. There’s little doubt that the Old Testament Peshitta was composed in or near Edessa during the third century or the early part of the fourth.5 The translator wrote in a local Syriac dialect, which bears similarities to inscriptions discovered by archaeologists in the region. He has substituted local place names, such as Nisibis and Haran, for some of the names in the Hebrew text, presumably to stoke the interest of his local readers.
Like the Septuagint, the Peshitta’s translator seems to have been a Jew. The way he writes suggests that he identified himself as part of an exiled Jewish community, experiencing all the hardships that such a status entailed. When deciding how to translate a phrase or word, he seems to have relied on earlier Jewish commentaries and explanations to guide him.
And yet the Old Testament Peshitta has never surfaced anywhere in the Jewish world. It was preserved by the Assyrian church. Unlike the Septuagint, there is no evidence that the Jews ever used it, or even knew of it. Indeed, if the church had not adopted and treasured it, we may never have known of this Jewish translation.
The reason why historians think that the Peshitta was written on the back of some great communal tragedy or upheaval is because of the way it handles the book of Chronicles. Unlike the rest of the Peshitta, which is generally a fairly direct translation from the Hebrew, Chronicles contains passages which the translator seems to have written himself. We find passages into which he weaves his own desperate feelings. At one point, in the middle of a prophecy eschewing idolatry, he complains, ‘we had forsaken the Lord our God and refused to hearken to his servants the prophets and he too has requited us for our deeds’.6 Quite what these deeds were, or how they were requited, we don’t know.
Although he identifies himself with the Jewish community, the Peshitta translator is not typical of the Jews of his day. He seems ignorant of certain basic practices, and yet he is assiduous, if idiosyncratic, about others. He doesn’t seem to subscribe to rabbinic Judaism, the mainstream religion which has survived to the present day. All in all he seems more interested in ideas of faith and belief than in religious practice and it appears he knows quite a lot less than we would expect about the way the Jewish religion was observed.
Michael Weitzman’s detailed analysis leads him to the conclusion that the Peshitta was translated by one or more Jews who had either never practised ritual Judaism or had long given it up. The obvious distress which the translator displays in Chronicles is probably the result of large-scale defections by members of the Jewish community to Christianity, an exodus he could not countenance and which caused him much heartache. It isn’t possible, without further evidence, to be more specific, but the fact that the Peshitta was preserved by the Church not by the Jews adds weight to the theory that the lapsed Jews brought their Syriac Old Testament with them when they converted.
Just like the Septuagint, the Peshitta was rejected by the Jews despite its Jewish origins. Maybe those Jews who did not convert had no use for it; it’s possible that they took a greater interest in their cultural heritage and could read the Bible in Hebrew, which was after all a sister language. Or perhaps they could understand the other Aramaic versions that were now in circulation. Known as Targum, these versions were to become the next battleground for the Bible. A battle which, this time, had nothing to do with the widening gulf between Judaism and Christianity, but which was fought between different camps within the Jewish world.
The Targum
Although Hebrew has always been the language of the Jews, it was not always the one they spoke. In much of the region in which the ancient Jews lived, the dominant language was Aramaic, the vernacular of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Judeans to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, Aramaic began to overtake Hebrew as the day-to-day speech of the Jews. It has been suggested that by the year 300 BCE every Jew who had acquired the skills to read was proficient in Aramaic.7 Three hundred years later, when Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem and preached to the villagers in Galilee, Aramaic had become the vernacular in Israel. Hebrew had been elevated to the status of a literary language; reserved for the Jewish religion, its scriptures, law and scholarship.
The Aramaic translation of the Bible developed in the Jerusalem Temple and the synagogue.8 It was originally declaimed alongside the reading of the Hebrew Bible, part of the regular prayer service. During the course of the year the Pentateuch, also known as the Five Books of Moses or Torah, was recited in its entirety, section by section, week by week. The cycle was completed in Israel every three years. In Jewish communities in Babylon and elsewhere the sequence of recitations were condensed into a year. Alongside the weekly reading of the Pentateuch there would also be a shorter reading on an associated theme from one of the books of the Prophets.
The biblical readings always took place in the original Hebrew.9 While Hebrew remained the language that people spoke, the readings we
re understood. Once Aramaic began to take over as the everyday language, fewer and fewer people in the synagogue were able to understand what was being read to them.
We don’t know when the first translator stood up in a synagogue and delivered an Aramaic rendering of the piece that had just been read in Hebrew. The Babylonian Talmud, the encyclopaedic record of discussions in Jewish religious academies during the third to fifth centuries, attributes the first translation to Ezra. He was one of the leaders of the Jewish community which resettled in Israel in the fifth century BCE, freshly liberated from the exile into which the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had driven them a century earlier.
The Bible recounts how Ezra and his colleagues assembled the returnees in front of the Water Gate in the newly rebuilt Jerusalem and read to them from the Five Books of Moses. We are told that they read the Torah, ‘with an interpretation, giving the meaning, so that they would understand the reading’.10 The phrase ‘with an interpretation’, says the Talmud, means that they read it together with the Targum.11 The Targum is what Aramaic translations of the Bible are called; the word is Aramaic for ‘translation’. The person who called out the translation in the synagogue was the meturgeman.12 A corruption of the word exists in English; an interpreter in an oriental country is often referred to as a dragoman.
If Ezra did read a translation of the Torah to the assembled masses it is pretty certain that he didn’t read from any of the various Aramaic translations that have come down to us through the ages. The oldest known Targum is attributed to Onkelos. We encountered him when discussing Aquila’s Greek translation; the two names sound similar in Hebrew and the early sources tended to muddle the two translators up. Although Onkelos is the earliest Targum that we know of, it probably wasn’t the first ever. Scholars believe that an earlier Targum existed, traces of which can still be seen in the translations which have survived till today.13
Onkelos lived in the late first, or early second century of the Christian era. He is frequently referred to in early Jewish sources as Onkelos the convert. Jewish tradition holds that he was a nephew of the Roman emperor Titus.14 It’s a quaint idea, but unlikely; there is no mention of Onkelos in any Roman source and it would be odd for a native speaker of Latin, however well educated, to compose an Aramaic translation of a Hebrew text. Titus did however have a cousin, Flavius Clemens, who, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, was executed for flirting with, and possibly even converting to Judaism.15 It is quite possible that, in an age when social standing was all-important, and great literature was produced by people of high birth, Onkelos the convert was repackaged by his followers as a pseudonym for Flavius Clemens the convert. This would make his Aramaic translation of the Old Testament far more significant and prestigious, in much the same way as the Septuagint had been lionized through its association in legend with the Alexandrian king Ptolemy.
The ancient Jewish religious authorities were not particularly keen on the Targum, but they were far less hostile towards it than they had been to the Septuagint. Unlike the Septuagint, the Targum hadn’t become the authoritative text of another religion. Nor was there an Aramaic equivalent of a sectarian, Hellenistic Judaism that claimed the Targum as its own.
That’s not to say that the rabbis didn’t try to control the Targum, to ensure it remained well within the fold. The danger we highlighted earlier, that the ability to understand a sacred text can lead people who are not members of the religious hierarchy to develop their own ideas, was as real in the case of the Targums as it had been for the Septuagint. And so the rabbis instituted, or at least tried to institute, measures to keep the meturgeman, and his Targum, under their control.
The earliest Jewish law codes specify various requirements to which the meturgeman was expected to adhere. Certain ignominious passages were not to be translated.16 Nor was the translation to be written down; there should be no possibility of people confusing it with the written Bible.17 The reader from the Bible in the synagogue was to pause after each sentence to allow the translation to be delivered; this minimized the risk of the meturgeman making mistakes because he had memorized too much all at once.18 All this was because the early Jewish legislators did not want the Targum to become a competing source of biblical interpretation, or of religious authority.
But of course this is exactly what happened. All the rules were ignored; written copies of the Targum have circulated since the earliest times, and they all translate the ‘forbidden’ passages. It seems that the constraints into which the rabbis tried to lever the Aramaic translations made little or no impression upon the translators themselves. Once again, the translated Bible was enmeshed in the politics of religious authority.
The rabbis’ rules about what could and could not be translated were not the only things to be ignored. Just as the rabbis had feared, the translators sometimes interpreted the biblical text in an unorthodox manner. Occasionally the rabbis would derive one practical ruling from a particular biblical text, and the meturgeman would derive another.19 This doesn’t mean that the translators were competing with the rabbis as legislators, but it does suggest that they weren’t too bothered about falling in line with the religious establishment. They even wrote in their own, unique dialect of ‘Late Jewish Literary Aramaic’,20 a form of the language that is unknown in any of the rabbinic writings.
Several different Targums have survived to our time. They include three full translations of the Pentateuch and at least one of every other book. For a long time they faded from popular view, with the exception of Onkelos, which is read in some oriental synagogues and by many religious Jews as part of their weekly study cycle.21
In the early twentieth century the Targums caught the interest of a small band of Christian scholars who were captivated by the apparent connection between the Aramaic of the Targum and the language that Jesus spoke. They assumed that the Targums and the New Testament were roughly contemporaneous, that Jesus and his disciples may have used them to read and understand the Bible, and that therefore the content of the Targums may throw light on the theology and background of the New Testament.22 The Harvard theologian George Foot Moore profoundly disagreed. He believed that the early Targum scholars had ‘very much overworked them . . . in consequence of the erroneous notion that they antedated the Christian era’.23
In the 1930s Paul Kahle, a Polish-German Lutheran pastor, published Targumic fragments that had been discovered in the Cairo Genizah. A Genizah is a place where Jews store worn-out, sacred documents, which may not be thrown away or burned. Instead they are either buried, or in many cases, simply piled up in an out-of-the-way place. The discovery of the Cairo Genizah had been one of the most fortuitous archival discoveries of the nineteenth century, the result of a visit to the Middle East in 1896 by two erudite Scottish adventurers, Mrs Agnes Smith Lewis and Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson.
The twin sisters were regular visitors to the Middle East and had already acquired a reputation for themselves as experts in ancient biblical manuscripts. During their 1896 journey, a dealer in antiquities turned up at their hotel room with some evidently ancient documents. Among them the sisters recognized Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible. They bought the collection and took them home. Sorting through the manuscripts on their return, the two ladies found they were unable to identify some of the fragments. They called in their friend Solomon Schechter, reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, and asked him to take a look.
Schechter could hardly believe what he saw. Among the documents that the women brought back was a Hebrew manuscript of part of the book of Ecclesiasticus, a work which is not included in the Hebrew Bible but which the Talmud refers to, and even quotes, in several places. Nobody had ever seen a Hebrew original; all the contemporary evidence suggested that it had been written in Greek. Schechter however had always held that Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sira as the Jews called it, was originally a Hebrew work; astonishingly he was at that very moment in the middle of an academic dispute with a colleague in Oxford who insist
ed that the work was originally Greek. In support of his contention Schechter had already pointed to a statement by the fourth-century Church father Jerome that he possessed a Hebrew version, and the book’s own introduction, dated to around 132 BCE, in which the author’s grandson claims to have translated it into Greek.
The document that the sisters showed him contained passages identical to those quoted in Hebrew in the Talmud. Taken together with the other evidence, Schechter’s position was vindicated. Ecclesiasticus was a Hebrew work after all, and the authoritative Greek version that had survived for centuries in the Apocrypha, the collection of biblical-era books that did not make it into the Jewish scriptures, turned out to be a translation.
This wasn’t the end of the story. Schechter, who had already heard rumours of ancient documents circulating in the back streets of Cairo, suspected that someone must have got hold of the contents of a Genizah. Furthermore he had a pretty good idea of where this Genizah was sited. He organized a trip to Cairo, made enquiries of the local Jewish community and was confirmed in his suspicions that a medieval Genizah still existed at the back of the ancient synagogue in Fostat, Old Cairo. Schechter visited the synagogue. He discovered an ancient storage chamber in a windowless and doorless bricked-up area, with one, solitary opening high in the wall through which documents could be posted. He climbed a ladder, crawled inside and discovered what turned out to be 193,000 Hebrew and Arabic documents, dating back to the year 870. Although some were crumbling, many had been preserved in the dry Egyptian air. It was a treasure trove documenting a thousand years of Egyptian and Jewish life. Alongside sacred texts it contained seemingly unimportant ephemera, shopping lists, bills of sale and personal correspondence.24
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 4
