Languages abounded in the Fertile Crescent of Late Antiquity at the time rabbinic Judaism slowly emerged as a mainstay of religious tradition. The Roman province of Judaea, later Palestine, found itself at the intersection of two linguae francae, Greek and Aramaic, with the religious tradition of its Jewish population mainly couched in Hebrew. These literary tongues went hand in hand with local vernaculars, the true variety of which will presumably always remain out of sight. The vicissitudes of Jewish life itself had long ensured that Jewish communities did not speak one language, but several and in different dialects to boot.

Since multilingualism and translation were old table fellows in the Ancient Near East and in Jewish society, it comes as no surprise that reflections on language and translation were widespread in Late Antiquity. Much has been written about the distinctive Jewish understanding of translation, and, in particular, about the contrast between the Jewish Hellenistic understanding of translation and the rather different rabbinic concept of translation, in which the Hebrew original categorically retained priority over its versions. Yet, despite widespread interest in multilingualism, language philosophy, the ancient scriptural translations and translation studies, no attempt has ever been made to correlate these topics for rabbinic Judaism in the first half of the first millennium CE, or to account for the whole complex of rabbinic views on language and translation against the backdrop of rabbinic culture at large.

Among the variables which define a text, context takes pride of place: what a text means to whom and where. No context is constant, stable, or unchallenged, but proper attention to the iteration of a text in extratextual conditions tells us something about that text; not so much about the established context for proper interpretation, but about the multiple contexts of textual instantiation.

If there ever was a range and variety of possible contextualizations for reading the Scriptures, rabbinic literature does not divulge the details to us. Although it is only to be expected that differences of context may have informed the way the Bible was read by Jewish communities in Palestine and the Diaspora, rabbinic literature describes the public recitation of the written Tora as a unitary and consistent practice with little room for variation. The public reading of the Tora and portions of the Prophets should be accompanied by an oral-performative translation, verse by verse, so that each Hebrew verse would be followed by an Aramaic version. The resultant bilingual, antiphonal text is commonly regarded as the norm in the Palestinian synagogues of Late Antiquity.

But in Late Antique Palestine the context of public reading was far from uniform: the coastal area and the Hellenistic cities, Jerusalem, Idumea, the (Lower and Upper) Galilee and the Golan did not share the same conditions and history, and these areas, let alone the various regions of the Western Diaspora, were probably not consistent in the degree to which they conformed to the legal decisions of rabbinic leaders.

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.