The Targums
The Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that accompanied synagogue reading and preserve ancient interpretation.
As Hebrew ceased to be understood in the synagogue, the reading of Scripture was accompanied by a spoken Aramaic rendering — the targum. In time the targums were written down: Targum Onkelos on the Torah, Targum Jonathan on the Prophets, and a freer body of targumic literature besides.
The targums are translations and interpretations at once: they render, paraphrase, and quietly teach, and they preserve how the scriptures were heard in the centuries around the New Testament.
References
- Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon — Targum resources Free / open access
Other Translation Traditions
- The Septuagint (LXX) — The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria — the Old Testament of the early church and of Orthodoxy.
- The Peshitta — The Syriac standard Bible, the first complete Bible translation of the Christian era, still read across the Syriac churches.
- The Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, the text of Western theology for a millennium and the Catholic Church's declared rule of faith at Trent.
- Vetus Latina (Old Latin) — The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
- The Ancient Church Translations: Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic — The early versions of the daughter churches, which preserved texts lost elsewhere and made the Bible a literature in five more tongues.
- Arabic Bible Translations — A thousand years of Arabic versions, differing by community and confession, down to the Van Dyck Bible of 1865.
- Modern Missionary and Vernacular Translation — The worldwide vernacular translation movement and the translation theory it produced, with its contested history.