The Text of the Targum of Job: An Introduction and Critical Edition.

• Author: Bernstein, Moshe J.

Critical texts of the Aramaic versions of the Hagiographa were not included in A. Sperber's The Bible in Aramaic Based on Old Manuscripts and Printed Texts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1959-73). Considerable interest in the targums has emerged in the years since that publication, evidenced by the first appearance of Targum Neofiti to the Pentateuch and M. L. Klein's editions of the Fragment Targum and the Genizah fragments of the Palestinian targum, as well as by a variety of monographic studies. Despite these developments, the targums of the Hagiographa have still remained virtually untouched. Of the larger books in the Hagiographa, only Chronicles has had its targum edited in a proper critical text, while Psalms, Proverbs, and Job have been all but ignored, except for F. J. Fernandez Vallina, El Targum de Job: Edicion critica (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1980). The texts of Ruth and Lamentations have appeared in unreliable critical editions from E. Levine, while the Western tradition of Lamentations has been edited by A. van der Heide. B. Grossfeld has furnished preliminary work to a critical text of the Aramaic versions of Esther, and L. Diez Merino has published editions of the Zamora text of Psalms and Job, among others. That last witness to the Aramaic version, certainly in Psalms, does not apparently belong to the principal text tradition of the targum.

One of the lacunae in the Hagiographa targums has now been filled by the appearance of the volume under review. Stec employed all available manuscripts of the medieval targum of Job (as opposed to 11QtgJob from Qumran) in order to assemble the full range of evidence for a critical text. The Hebrew section of the book contains that edition with all of the available textual information clearly laid out for the reader. Fernandez Vallina, according to Stec (p. 2), collated only eight manuscripts for his edition, compared with Stec's fourteen and two printed texts. Even trivial orthographical differences among manuscripts have been recorded, a feature which will appeal to students of Aramaic more than to those of targumic exegesis.

The introductory material furnished by Stec focuses almost exclusively on textual issues. Although we should not expect that the relationship among targumic manuscripts will be identical in the case of different biblical books, his classification of some of the manuscripts confirms my own sense of their relationship, based on my work with the targum of Psalms.

The...