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Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Review of Gottlieb, Targum Chronicles and its Place Among the Late Targums (Brill)

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Book Note | Targum Chronicles and its Place Among the Late Targums. (A.J. Berkovitz).
Gottlieb, Leeor. Targum Chronicles and Its Place Among the Late Targums. Brill, 2020.

[...]

As the book’s name implies, Gottlieb offers a detailed study of Targum Chronicles. Targum Chronicles itself combines into one neat package two features: a verse-by-verse Aramaic translation of the Hebrew books of 1-2 Chronicles and an anthology of rabbinic exegesis, mostly from the Babylonian Talmud, on those biblical books. In his 518-page study of this text, Gottlieb develops two major claims. First, he attempts to definitively prove that sometime between the end of the twelfth and the late thirteenth century, a European Jew, who likely lived in Italy, composed this Aramaic edition of Chronicles as a tool for Jewish Bible study. Prior scholarship had, by contrast, dated Targum Chronicles to between the 4th and 8th centuries and set its context as the Land of Israel or its environs.

I noted the publication of the book here.

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