By Bruce D. Chilton
Introduction, Translation, Apparatus and Notes
Michael Glazier, 1999, 130 pages
ISBN: 0814654800
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The Isaiah Targum By Bruce D. Chilton Introduction, Translation, Apparatus and Notes Michael Glazier, 1999, 130 pages ISBN: 0814654800 |
Reviewed by Israel Drazin - July 28, 2010
As pointed out in the reviews of the other books in the nineteen volume Michael Glazier English rendering of the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible, the Aramaic translators changed the text of Scripture to insert their own views. See, for example, the review of Targum Jonathan of the Former Prophets. This volume contains the English translation of the Isaiah Targum (a word meaning translation). The following are two examples of the changes in chapter 40.
The Isaiah Aramaic translator was faced with a text in chapter 40 filled with beautiful poetic statements that he felt he needed to clarify in prosaic language. He especially wanted to rid his translation of anthropomorphic images, physical depictions of God, or at least down play them. Thus in 40:3, a path is not cleared for God, as the Bible states, but for the Israelites who are returning from the Babylonian exile. Besides avoiding the anthropomorphic image of God traversing a desert, like a walking human, the Aramaic change also avoids the Christological interpretation that the passage refers to Jesus coming to the people after a forty day stay in the desert.
The Isaiah translator is not the perfect theologian. He seems to treat the Shekhinah, described below, in verse 22 as a kind of divine being who is separate from God and who has a dwelling in heaven. This is close to a polytheistic portrayal; there is God and there is the Shekhinah. It is contrary to Targum Onkelos's understanding (Onkelos was the rabbinically authorized Aramaic translation) that the Shekhinah is a human feeling of God's presence either here on earth (a feeling of God's imminence) or in heaven (that God is transcendent), not a being and not part of God, which the Isaiah translator seems to say. The philosopher Moses Maimonides' (1138-1204) also writes in Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 8, that Shekhinah is "a knowledge and realization of the truth concerning God" not a separate being.
