The Major Targums

Targum Onkelos on the Torah is the corpus's official core. Composed in a literary Aramaic and transmitted with its own masorah, it stays close to the Hebrew except where theology or halakhah required adjustment, and the Babylonian Talmud already treats it as the authoritative translation, prescribing private review of the weekly portion twice in Scripture and once in Targum, a practice still followed. Targum Jonathan on the Prophets, traditionally ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, holds the same official standing for the prophetic books and renders their poetry with more interpretive freedom.

Beside these Babylonian-redacted works stands the Palestinian Targum tradition on the Torah: Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the most expansive, thick with aggadah and late enough to contain post-Islamic references; the Fragment Targums; and Targum Neofiti, a complete Palestinian Targum identified in the Vatican Library in 1956 after centuries of miscataloguing, the single most important Targum discovery of the modern era. Later Targums cover the Writings, including a double Targum on Esther, though none of these attained liturgical standing. Dating individual Targums is notoriously difficult, since each preserves early traditions inside later redactions, and scholarly estimates for the same work can span half a millennium.