Targum Onkelos
By Israel Drazin - January 5, 2010
The rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud called Targum Onkelos the authoritative translation of the Bible. Although these rabbis authored Midrashim and the Talmuds, they did not tell Jews to read these two works every week with the weekly Torah portion. Instead, they instructed Jewry to read the Bible in its original Hebrew twice each week and once in Targum Onkelos. This rabbinical mandate was so important that all the Jewish codes of law include this obligation.
The printers of rabbinic Bibles, volumes that can sometimes contain as many as three dozen rabbinical commentaries, placed Targum Onkelos in the premier center spot, alongside the original Hebrew text, in every Torah publication.
Rashi, Tosaphot, Maharsha and others felt that the Targum is so significant and so holy that it must have originated as a gift from God to the Israelites at Sinai. Every Bible commentator, past and present, examines the renderings of Onkelos before commenting on a verse.
While Onkelos is the most literal of all the Aramaic ancient translations, it contains over ten thousand deliberately inserted differences from the Hebrew original. The vast majority of the changes – almost eighty percent – are designed to make the Torah more understandable for the average reader. For example, the targumist explains many metaphors.
Close to twenty percent of the targumic deviations were inserted to show respect for God. The Bible depicts God performing acts as if He were a corporeal being – such as stretching out His arm – so that the people, accustomed to such phrases, could understand the text. Hundreds of these physical descriptions of God are altered by the substitution of such terms as shekhinah (a human feeling of the "presence" of God), dachal (a human sense of "fear" of the divinity), yekara (a depiction of the feeling of the appearance of God’s "glory," rather than God Himself), and kadam (literally "before," a term separating the human from the divine – for example, people do not give a sacrifice to God, but "before" God).
The Onkelos targumist also altered his translation in many instances to depict the Israelite ancestors in a better light. This occurs, for example, over one hundred times in the book of Genesis. In Exodus, for instance, he alters "who did not know Joseph," to "who did not fulfill Joseph’s decrees," thinking that Joseph would be belittled if the new Pharaoh was ignorant of the magnificent work and achievements of this Israelite patriarch in Egypt.
These are just some of the elements in Targum Onkelos. But first and foremost, is the fact that the rabbis insisted that Jews read Onkelos weekly and not their midrashic, homiletical, or halakhic, legal, explanations of the Torah because they wanted, indeed insisted, that Jews know the plain meaning of the Torah, which is in Targum Onkelos.
Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of seventeen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he co-authors with Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides. The Orthodox Union (OU) and Yeshiva University publish weekly chapters of Drazin and Wagner's book Let's Study Onkelos on www.ou.org/torah and on www.yutorah@yutorah.org. His website is http://booksnthoughts.com.