apostles of Him who came to fulfil the types and predictions of the Old Testament, and put the world in possession of the Book which tells its dying generations of mercy and immortality.

The Bible is for the world. The families of mankind have in it their common genealogical register, and the Divine charter of their common rights. The great principles of the moral government under which we live are here unfolded; the laws which insure the welfare of our social life, the truth that will correct our errors, the balsam that can heal our wounds, the redemption that has atoned for our guilt, and will at last abolish death, have here their sealed revelation. As in these discoveries every human being has an interest, reason, benevolence, and the mandate of the Spirit who speaks in the word, all bind upon the Church the duty of giving the Bible to the nations of the earth, and, as a matter of necessity for the attainment of this object, of translating it into their various languages.

But while the necessity of translations for the benefit of the Gentile peoples needs no illustration, it might seem strange, on the first view of the fact, that the Hebrew people should require a translation of the Hebrew Bible. This apparent anomaly disappears, however, on our calling to mind the circumstances in which that people were found at the commencement of the Christian era. At that time the Jews resident in Palestine formed but a fragment of the nation; for, besides various colonies scattered among the chief cities of the civilized world, a multitude of them were regularly established in Egypt, and another considerable portion were equally, or more firmly, rooted in the Babylonian lands, from whence, at the close of the Captivity, their ancestors had not chosen to return, and where, in possession of every civil advantage with entire

religious liberty, they had become a great and prosperous people. In Egypt the Hellenistic Jews spoke the current Macedonian Greek, and in Babylonia the ordinary Aramaic of the country. In Palestine, also, with very few exceptions, the language in current use was a dialect composed of an Aramaic basis with a slight intermixture of Hebrew and exotic elements. Indeed, from the time of the restoration under Ezra, or rather, as we may say, for nearly a century before it, the Hebrew language, as it exists in the Bible, had ceased to be the vernacular of the Jewish people.

Whether, therefore, denizens of Egypt or of Babylonia, or on their home soil of Palestine, the common people needed a translation of the holy writings into their every-day speech. In Egypt this want was well met by the existence of the Septuagint version, and in Chaldea and the Holy Land by the office of the synagogal meturgeman or "interpreter," which, appointed by Ezra and the national council of the "Great Synagogue," became an established institution in Israel for nearly a thousand years.

The earliest labours of the meturgemanin were merely oral. As the reader in the synagogue recited the lessons for the day from the Hebrew originals, the interpreter rendered them, verse by verse, into the popular dialect; and in those seasons when public discourses were delivered in Hebrew, it was his office, as amora, to give them to the people, passage after passage, in the same way.

This ministerial interpretation of the Scriptures was not long confined to the vivâ voce manner; for, whether by the notes of the laity, or by the official pen of the meturgeman, those paraphrases soon took a written

1 See the chapter 66 Vortragswesen des Alterthums "Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden," s. 329.

" in ZUNZ's

form, under the name of TARGUMS:-Targuma, interpretatio, from Targem, exposuit.

2

Of this description of biblical literature the primeval specimens are no longer extant. We have references in the Talmud to written paraphrases which were evidently in use before the Christian era; and it has been well argued that Targums on those books imply the existence of others on the Law and the Prophets. It may be noted here also, that the Peschito Syriac version of the Old Testament, which is, strictly speaking, a Targum in the Western Aramaic spoken throughout Syria, is thought by good critics to be a Jewish production of times long anterior to the apostolic age. As a literal and very able translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that version is beyond all price.

The Cuthim, or Samaritans, too, gloried in the possession of the pure text of the Hebrew Pentateuch; but in their temple at Garis the people listened to a paraphrase of it in their own uncouth dialect; a paraphrase which, like the Chaldee Targums, took a written form a long time before the Christian epoch. The general tone of this venerable translation is a literal adherence to the Hebrew text, varied only by the practice of the author, who appears to have been a strict Monotheist, in reducing all anthropomorphistic representations of the Divine Being to other modes of expression, and in rendering tropical phrases into corresponding proper ones. In a manner similar to the Chaldee Targumists in the use of the title, Memra da Yeya, "the Word of the Lord," he employs the title Malak Eloha, "the Angel of God," to express the Divine names, Jehovah and

2 One on Job: Tosefta Shab., c. 14; Shabbath, c. 16, 1; Jerus., with other references in R. Nathan's Aruch and Tract. Soferim, 5, 15. One on Esther, Megilla, f. 3, a. One on the Psalms, Vajikra Rabba, 174, c,

Elohim. The paraphrase was probably retouched in later days from the Targum of Oukelos.

The Chaldee Targums now extant range over the whole area of the Old-Testament Scriptures, with the exception of the Book of Daniel. On the Pentateuch there are two, with the names of Onkelos and Jonathan. On the former and latter prophets one, attributed also to Jonathan; others on the Ketuvim and Megilloth, ascribed, though dubiously, to Mar Josef, a president of the school of Sora in the fourth century; and finally a modern one on the Chronicles and Ezra.

On the authorship of the Targums on the Pentateuch the learned Jews of the present day are divided by two opposite opinions. One class attribute them to Onkelos a proselyte, and to Jonathan ben Uzziel, who are held to have been contemporary students at the rabbinical school in Jerusalem within the half century before Christ. Dr. Zunz may be said to represent the opinion of the greater number of his co-religionists when he says, in general terms, that "Onkelos, somewhere upon the time of Philo, translated the Pentateuch, and that Jonathan ben Uzziel, the paraphrast on the prophetical books, was a scholar of Hillel."

6

On the other hand, in the judgment of Luzzatto, and Geiger, and indeed of others before them, these Targums are the work of the Babylonish schoolmen; like the Septuagint, elaborated by a society or college of

3 See WINER, Dissertatio de Vers. Pentat. Sam. Indole, Lips, 1817. Comp. SCHWARZ, Diss. de Samaria et Samaritanis, Viteb., 1753, and the Exercitationes Biblica of JEAN MORINUS. I have given the most important readings of the Samaritan version in the margin of the following translation of the Targum of Onkelos.

4 ZUNZ, G. V., 62.

5 Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhangigkeit von der innern Entwickelung des Judenthums. Von DR. ABRAHAM GEIGER. 1857.

6 WOLF, Bibliotheca Hebræa, 3, 891.

meturgemanin, who completed them in the fourth century. Two new translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek had been made a considerable time previously, by Aquilas and Theodotion, which, to the minds of many of the Greek-reading Jews, had eclipsed the old version of the Seventy; and some features of resemblance in the spirit and style of the new Chaldee Targums, with the two favourite Greek versions, induced the authors of the former to indicate that resemblance by giving them the Hebraized names of the popular translators. Thus to the Targum on the Pentateuch they affixed the name of Aquilas, or, as it was pronounced in Babylonia, Ankelos or Onkelos; while the version of the Prophets bore the name of Jonathan, which in Hebrew is of exactly the same meaning as the Greek Theodotion. By this not unusual procedure they intended to say nothing more than that the one Targum was done after the strictly literal manner of Aquilas, and the other, after the more free manner of Theodotion. This opinion will be estimated upon its own merits. It wants historic corroboration, and so far fails to clear up a problem which has not yet been solved."

Of the characteristics of the Targums at large, I have given some account elsewhere. The few remarks

7 Aquilas lived in the beginning of the second century. The fragments of his translation yet extant have been edited by Montfaucon: Aquilæ V. T. Versionis Fragmenta quæ supersunt. They may be found in his Hexaplarum Origenis quæ supersunt Fragmenta, tom. 2. Paris, 1714; and by C. F. Bahrdt: Hexapl. Orig. quæ supers. Fragmenta auctiora et emendatiora, tom. 2. Leipzig, 1769. On the application of his name to the Targum on the Pentateuch, see Rudolf Anger, De Onkelo, Chaldaico, quem ferunt, Pentateuchi Paraphraste, et quid ei Rationis intercedat cum Akila. Leipzig, 1845. Rich in quotations from the Talmuds and Midrashim bearing on the question. Theodotion was a Jewish proselyte towards the close of the first century. The remains of his version are also treasured in the above work of Montfaucon.