The Targums arose from a liturgical need. By the late Second Temple period most Jews heard the weekly Torah reading in a language they no longer spoke, so a translator, the meturgeman, stood beside the reader and rendered each verse into Aramaic from memory, since writing the translation into the scroll was forbidden. The Mishnah regulates the practice: one verse at a time for the Torah, and certain passages, such as the story of Reuben, to be read but not translated at all. That last rule reveals what a Targum really was. It did not merely transfer words; it decided what the congregation should understand.
The extant Targums soften the Bible's anthropomorphisms, so that where the Hebrew says God saw, the Aramaic may say it was revealed before the Lord. They resolve legal ambiguities in line with rabbinic ruling, identify unnamed figures, and read messianic hope into the prophets. The expansive Palestinian Targums go further, folding entire aggadic narratives into the text, so that Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis carries traditions found nowhere in the Hebrew. For scholars the Targums are therefore a double witness: to the text of the Bible as it was received, and to the living interpretation of the synagogue in late antiquity, verse by verse and week by week.