The original requires translation even if no translator is there, fit to respond to this injunction, which is at the same time demand and desire in the very structure of the original. This structure is the relation of life to survival.

—Jacques Derrida

In its survival—which would not merit the name if it were not mutation and renewal of something living—the original is modified.

—Walter Benjamin

If the book of Lamentations ends with the absence of God and the absence of Zion's children, Second Isaiah ends with the full (one might even say overfull) restoration of both. The answer from God that Zion demanded crowds the chapters of Second Isaiah, and the children she lamented, the children of her bereavement, crowd the desolate places. The antiphonal response of Second Isaiah endeavors to match the intensity of complaint with an equal intensity of response. The poet imagines to have filled the lack that confronts the reader of Lamentations.

The irony of Second Isaiah's attempt to answer the language of death and absence in Lamentations, to counter it with the language of survival, is that it threatens the very life of Lamentations as literature. The “potentially eternal afterlife” of the work of art about which Walter Benjamin writes depends on a “demand and desire” that cannot be easily nullified.¹ Writing about the “unfinishedness” of a text that “overruns all the limits assigned to it,” Jacques Derrida concedes that such a de-bordement (or “overflowing”) “will still have come as a shock, producing endless efforts to dam up, resist, rebuild the old partitions.”² Second Isaiah's antiphonal response to Lamentations may be taken as just such an effort to dam up the torrent of rage (on the part of God), death (on the part of the children), and tears (on the part of Mother Zion) that “pour out” from the book.³

The effort of Second Isaiah to counter the overrun of Lamentations, to establish the outer edge of its reach, is at most partly successful. This effort … was in the service of a particular ideology for a particular social and historical context, and it consequently took a form appropriate to that context. However, the response of Second Isaiah was generated not only by its own sociohistorical context, but also by the “original” to which it responds, the book of Lamentations itself. Despite the forceful nature of its rhetoric of survival, Second Isaiah does not answer Lamentations once and for all, though the poet may have wished to do so for his own generation. The “demand and desire in the very structure of the original” of which Derrida writes in the epigraph to this … [essay], though generative of those attempts to meet them, are finally independent of such attempts. This is, Derrida claims, “the relation of life to survival.” Recall Benjamin's description of the “vital connection” between a text and its translation:

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with life itself without signifying anything for it, a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its “afterlife.”⁴

As a “survival” of Lamentations, the poetry of Second Isaiah participates in its afterlife, but does not affect the “life” of the original to which it responds. Regarding the book of Lamentations, to borrow Derrida's description of Blanchot's novella, “[w]hat must remain beyond its reach is precisely what revives it at every moment.”⁵ The survival that is lacking in the literature is what ensures the survival of Lamentations as literature. The demand of Zion for her children's survival and the reader's desire to meet that demand, which may potentially come together every time the biblical book is read, draw attention to the lack that remains in the original and thereby ensure that survival remains very much a live issue in the history of interpretation.

The book of Lamentations remains, and so remains its voicing of the plight of children and its utter lack of consolation. Thus, in other interpretive contexts than Second Isaiah's, one may expect the book of Lamentations to exert no less powerful an influence on those texts that survive it. And while the need for a response to Zion's appeal will stay prominent in this interpretive afterlife, it will be met in differing ways according to different sociohistorical horizons. The next scene in the drama of the afterlife of Lamentations may be found in Targum Lamentations (an Aramaic translation from late antiquity), wherein one can explore another attempt to address the concerns of Mother Zion.

THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF TARGUM

Before looking at the specifics of the response to Zion in Targum Lamentations, it will be useful to explore the character of targum in general and, in particular, how it relates to Walter Benjamin's notion of translation as survival.

TARGUM AS TRANSLATION

It is routine among scholars to describe the essential nature of targum as “translation.” Indeed, the word targum (plural targumim) itself derives from the quadrilateral Semitic root, which carries the basic sense of “to translate.” The root seems to be used in this sense in its only biblical occurrence (Ezra 4:7), and in rabbinic Hebrew the pi‘el form of the verb (tîrgēm) means to translate the Bible from Hebrew into a second language, usually Aramaic but at times Greek (y. Qiddushin 59a; y. Megillah 71c). In modern scholarship, however, the term “targum” is used in a restricted sense to refer to a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic. Targum may refer to either the practice of translation that took place in ancient synagogues, or the literary documents that preserve actual Aramaic versions of biblical books. In a standard survey of the history of Jewish literature, Meyer Waxman expresses well the common explanation for the origins of targum:

With the return of the Jews from Babylon, there began the spread of Aramaic in Palestine as a spoken language, or as a vernacular, … [and] under the circumstances there arose a need for the use of the Aramatic in the teaching and the interpretation of the Bible to the people.⁶

According to the Mishnah (m. Megillah 4:4), the translation into Aramaic was made in tandem with the reading from the Hebrew original, with no pause between the two. There were strict rabbinic rules on the practice of targum, including the stipulation that while the Hebrew must always be read, the targum was always to be recited orally. Targum belonged to the Oral Torah, and was always to be distinguished from the Written Torah.⁷

There are, however, problems with the accepted account of the origins and function of targum. First, the prohibition on reducing targumim to writing raises the question of how the targum as document began and what function it may have had. Second, explaining the origin of targum as institution in terms of a simple need to communicate the Hebrew Bible to speakers of Aramaic fails to explain why the practice of targum persisted even after Aramaic was replaced by Arabic as the vernacular. Third, even the basic sense of targum as a “translation” at all has come under challenge, given the seeming liberties that the targum takes in adding to and explaining the biblical material.

Alexander Samely has addressed these issues in an important way in his book The Interpretation of Speech in the Pentateuch Targums. Samely writes:

The assessment that the original rationale of oral targum was very likely a translation need and its Sitz im Leben the synagogal Bible lesson, together with the fact that written targums happen to be in Aramaic, has effectively channeled the literary form of targum in the direction of translation.⁸

Samely challenges the assumption that targum should be understood as belonging to the genre of translation on two counts. First, he holds that “there is no other translational text in Jewish antiquity (or, as far as I am aware, outside it) that shares the peculiar features of targum,” and that there is no ancient theory of translation to account for it.⁹ Second, he raises the very cogent point that to call translation a “genre” (as scholars are wont to do in regard to targum) is to obscure the fact that the text to be translated, rather than the existence of the targum as translation, determines the question of genre. Samely himself prefers to call targum “Aramaic paraphrase.” While I find much of Samely's argument convincing, I am less content than he to be rid of the word “translation” in reference to targum. As Samely admits, although the targum does indeed add much to the original text, it does this in addition to, not instead of, translating it.¹⁰ Additions are made between sentences, between phrases, and even between words, yet they virtually never replace the original words or their sequence. So while targum is in fact translation, it is not “merely” translation. As I will argue below, the targum is an extraordinary example of Walter Benjamin's notion of translation as survival.

TARGUM AS EXEGESIS

It is also routine among scholars to agree that the targumim as we have them preserve much more than what is commonly thought of as translation. In fact, the verbal form tîrgēm in rabbinic Hebrew may also mean to “explain” or “interpret” a biblical verse or a mishnah in the same language as the original text. So while targum can be rightly described as translation, it can also be rightly described as interpretation. Having said that targum is or contains interpretation as well as translation, one must inquire how the two are related and, furthermore, what sort of interpretation the targumim represent. Such an inquiry is most commonly done in terms of “explanation.” That is, scholars have assumed that the primary task of the meturgeman (the reciter of targum) was to impart information to the hearer, and so was “prepared to introduce into the translation as much interpretation as seemed necessary to clarify the sense.”¹¹ Sperber argues that targum was intended to make the Scriptures available to “the less educated classes,” and so it was primarily concerned with “clarity of expression” in order that “the listener or the reader does not have to exert his intelligence” to understand the Bible.¹²

While this line of reasoning may account for some aspects of targum, it cannot explain the material in targum that so obviously does not serve simply to explain or clarify, but in fact often makes the targum a much more complicated document than the original. Consequently, the theory of targumic interpretation as explanation must exclude such material from what is essential to targum. This is done by calling this material “aggadic [midrashic or interpretive] embellishment,”¹³ and thus equating it with midrash … rather than targum, or by simply dismissing those targumim with a preponderance of such material as not genuine targum at all. As Waxman writes: “The versions to the Five Scrolls [Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther] are really no translations but homiletic Midrashim.”¹⁴ Even those scholars who admit that the more expansive material is not alien to targum nevertheless tend to see no intrinsic connection between the interpretations offered by the targumim and the material that they translate. Consider Etan Levine's statement in his introduction to Targum Lamentations:

To make the biblical text more understandable, acceptable, relevant or polemical, midrash or midrashic allusion was woven into the translation, forming a continuous reading without distinction between translation, alteration and addition.¹⁵

Although Levine argues strongly that the expansive material in Targum Lamentations should be considered original to it, that is, not a later interpolation, he nevertheless does not view it as either related to the biblical text or intrinsic to the character of targum. The material is “midrashic” and, since it exists as clarification or polemic, is primary related to the horizon of the meturgeman rather than the biblical text.

I am once again in agreement with Alexander Samely, who argues against the consensus that targum is fundamentally “exegetical” in nature. After a thorough investigation of Pseudo-Jonathan, Samely concludes that “exegetical preoccupations set the topic both for apparently narrative additions and theological statements.”¹⁶ Although the targumim undoubtedly contain theological and polemical material that reflects rabbinic ideological concerns, the same material can also be considered and studied as exegesis of the original Hebrew text; the one does not preclude the other. Before considering below how the targumic expansions concerning Zion and her children exist in an exegetical relationship to the biblical text of Lamentations, I will first address briefly the appropriateness of understanding targum in terms of “survival.”

TARGUM AS SURVIVAL

While the categories of translation and exegesis are able to comprehend certain aspects of targum and the targumim, neither alone is able to account for targum as a whole. I suggested above that targum is an extraordinary example of Walter Benjamin's description of translation in terms of survival. I intend in this section to make clear what I mean by that and to show that taking targum as “survival,” as a manifestation of the “afterlife” of a biblical text, accounts for the disparate aspects of targumic literature that have so vexed the attempts to categorize it.

In “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin writes the following concerning translation:

For in its survival—which would not merit the name if it were not the mutation and renewal of something living—the original is modified. Even for the firmly established word there is still a postmaturation.¹⁷

The two words that Benjamin uses here to describe what he means by survival, “mutation” and “renewal,” correspond well to the two aspects of targum identified above: renewal being the essence of translation, and mutation capturing well the exegetical bent of targum. The targumim as translations allow for the original texts to be “renewed” in a new context and for a new audience. In Benjamin's words, “their translation marks their stage of continued life.” In one sense, this is not so very different from the standard description of targum as translation. Except that Benjamin is adamant that translation, or at least what he deems to be “good” translation, does not concern itself with the imparting of information or even with the audience at all, which is the hallmark of the traditional scholarly view of targum. According to Benjamin, this would be to transmit only “something inessential” to the original. “If the original does not exist for the reader's sake, how could the translation be understood on the basis of this premise?”¹⁸ Since the work of art or literature is unconcerned either to impart information or to address its audience (“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener”) but rather strives toward something it lacks, a good translation exists simply because the original “calls for it.”¹⁹ Translation is renewal, but a renewal driven not by the demand of an audience but rather by the demand of the original.

Benjamin's typically overreaching formulation of the problem likely needs to be nuanced; yet he provides the concepts and terminology by which to articulate a more complex understanding of targum. The targumim surely exist as a sort of “mutation” of the original. Not only does the original experience a renewed life, but a life that is significantly different from its previous form. For the modern reader with the biblical and targumic texts of Lamentations side by side, it may be that the “mutation” represented by the targum—its expansions of dialogue, direct address to the audience, and interpretive material—in rendering the “original” precludes it from even being called a translation. It must be kept in mind, however, that the targumim were never meant to replace an original text, but rather were produced “in tandem” with the Hebrew verses they translated and took place before an attentive and critical audience. As Avigdor Shinan notes, “the proximity of the Hebrew scriptural verse was crucial.”²⁰ The issue becomes, then, not whether or not targum is a mutation of the original, but to what extent this mutation is a part of the original's striving toward what it lacks. As I will show below, the expansions in Targum Lamentations concerning Zion and her children are not unrelated to the biblical text and are not just polemic or explanation geared for the text's new audience. Rather, they exist in an exegetical relationship to the biblical text as part of an interpretive afterlife generated by the original text. Commenting on Benjamin's essay on translation, Derrida writes:

If the translator neither restitutes nor copies an original, it is because the original lives on and transforms itself. The translation will truly be a moment in the growth of the original, which will complete itself in enlarging itself. Now, it has indeed to be, and it is in this that the “seminal” logic must have imposed itself on Benjamin, that growth not give rise to just any form in just any direction. Growth must accomplish, fill, complete.²¹

If what Derrida writes is true for the targum, that its excesses come about because “the original calls for a complement,”²² and if my reading of the “original” Lamentations is correct, that it is driven by a concern for the suffering of children, then one may presume a confluence of the two claims. In other words, does the targum exhibit “growth” along the trajectory of “concern for children”? The answer is yes, as the following discussion of Targum Lamentations will show.

THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF TARGUM LAMENTATIONS

Targum Lamentations exists in two recensions: the Western Text and the Yemenite Text. Western Text manuscripts were written in Europe and North Africa, but their origins are generally thought to be Palestinian.²³ The relationship between the two recensions is not clear, though it appears that in many cases the Yemenite Text offers a truncated version of the Western Text.²⁴ Any influence from one recension to another, however, should be considered late. Philip Alexander, after a detailed comparison of the two recensions of Targum Lamentations, concludes:

The two families of texts cannot be stemmatically related to each other, nor should the procedures of classical text criticism be applied to recover a common Urtext behind them. West. cannot be derived mechanically from Yem. as it stands, or vice versa. The variations are large, widespread and systematic, and, therefore, recensional.²⁵

Owing to its superior linguistic coherence, the Yemenite Text has been given more attention by philologists and has been the basis of two modern critical editions, those of Sperber and van der Heide.²⁶ The Western Text has been used for only one modern edition, that of Levine, which has been severely criticized by other scholars for its general sloppiness.²⁷ But with regard to the substance (as opposed to linguistic coherence) of the recension, the Western Text is superior. “There can be no doubt that if we are concerned with the aggadic content of the Targum, then our starting-point must be the western recension.”²⁸ Since the aggadic content is my main concern in this … [essay], I will utilize the Western Text in the discussion below, referring to the Yemenite tradition when appropriate.

As with the practice of targum in general, in Targum Lamentations the aggadic material is interwoven with the original text, thus producing what often seems like a completely new literature, while nevertheless maintaining a near lexical equivalent for every word in the original. The aggadic additions in Targum Lamentations occur almost exclusively in chapters 1 and 2.²⁹ In chapters 3-5 of the targum one finds nearly a word-for-word rendering of the Hebrew into Aramaic, with only one genuine expansion (in 3:28; to which I will return below). Previous studies concerned with the theological implications of Targum Lamentations have tended to focus on the expansions to the opening verses of chapter 1, where the theme of Israel's sin is quite prevalent. In this section of the targum, one finds two major blocks of midrashic material that emphasize a history of sinfulness. The fourth petihta (proem, or introductory comments; plural petihtaot) of the midrash to Lamentations, which connects the opening word, “Alas” (pronounced ’êkah), of Lamentations 1:1 with God's question to Adam in Genesis 3, “Where are you?” (pronounced ’ayyekah), is utilized to compare the exile of Judah with the banishment from Eden. A comment on Numbers 14:1, recounting how God decided to allow the temple to be destroyed on the Ninth of Av because that was the day that Israel wept in response to the negative report brought back by the spies sent to Canaan, is inserted into verse 2.³⁰ According to the targum, Israel was given the opportunity by Jeremiah to repent but did not do so and the destruction was carried out.

By focusing on these expansions to the opening verses, and by arguing that they set the tone for all that follows, scholars have construed Targum Lamentations as a monolithic document that can be read only as advocating an acceptance of suffering as “punishment [that] was deserved for acting against God's will.”³¹ As was the case with biblical Lamentations, however, this is simply too reductive of a reading of the targum text. In the following section, I will focus on the expansions explicitly connected to the figure of Zion and her children, which have tended to be excluded from discussions of the theological Tendenz of the targum. But in doing so, I will demonstrate that Targum Lamentations participates in the exegetical trajectory that I have identified in the history of interpretation. I will also argue that Targum Lamentations offers a more complex and conflicted attitude toward suffering than is usually acknowledged by those interpreters who characterize it as an unwavering voice of orthodoxy.

ZION AND HER CHILDREN IN TARGUM LAMENTATIONS

In my reading of Lamentations … I identified a number of key verses in the biblical text where Zion focused on the survival of her children. Three of these verses were 1:16, 2:20, and 2:22. It is significant that at these verses in particular Targum Lamentations evinces a desire to supplement the biblical text, and it is quite telling to notice how it goes about making these supplements. I will look closely at each of these verses in Targum Lamentations in comparison with the original in the Masoretic text of Lamentations, and then conclude this … [essay] with a consideration of the theological implications of these supplements.

LAMENTATIONS 1:16

Lamentations 1:16 was a crucial verse for my reading of the Masoretic text of Lamentations in chapter two [in Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations], since here Zion is first presented as overcome with emotion on behalf of her abused children. The biblical text of 1:16 reads:

For these things I weep … My eyes, my eyes!
          They stream with tears.
How far from me is one to comfort,
          one to restore my life.
My children are ravaged;
          the enemy has triumphed.

Zion's initial accusation against God (combined with elements of the description of pain) in 1:11c-16 culminates with this emphasis on children, an emphasis that becomes even clearer in Lamentations 2. But given the other motifs present in this first speech of Zion, one might understandably equivocate on my claim for the preeminence of the children here. In fact, Claus Westermann takes the phrase “for these things” to refer back to the previous material rather than to what follows in 1:16. He even argues that 16c “exhibits no meaningful connection” with its surrounding context.³² To read 1:16 as Westermann does obviously undercuts much of the emphasis on the survival of Zion's children that I identified as coming into focus here. The targum's version of 1:16, however, explicitly reinforces such an emphasis on children. It reads:

Because of the babes who were smashed and the pregnant women whose wombs were torn open, the Congregation of Israel says, “I weep, and my eyes pour out tears like a spring of waters. Look how far from me is any comforter to revive me and to give my life consolation. Oh, how my children are desolate, look how the enemy has triumphed over them.”³³

While the targum makes some typical minor changes, such as rendering “my eye, my eye” as “my eyes”³⁴ and identifying Zion as “the Congregation of Israel,” the most significant change is the addition of the two italicized phrases.³⁵ While the biblical text reads only “because of these things I weep,” mentioning the children at the end of the verse, the targum supplements this with the first additional phrase “Because of the babes who were smashed and the pregnant women whose wombs were torn open.” The cause of Zion's breakdown, which I identified as the fate of the children, is picked up by the targum as a point of supplementarity. By presenting the children as “smashed” and “torn” from their mothers' wombs, the targum intensifies the emotional level. And by having the fate of the children at the beginning and end of the verse, thus forming an inclusio, it emphasizes their importance as the cause of Zion's (or Congregation of Israel's) weeping.

Perhaps too much should not be made of the presence of the second additional phrase, which I have rendered as “and to give my life consolation”. It is missing from all the manuscripts of the Yemenite recension, but its presence in the Western Text adds one key theme to the verse. A more literal translation of the Aramaic phrase would be “to speak consolation over my life.” Thus, the addition of this phrase connects comfort with speech. This was also a key theme in chapter 2 of Lamentations, where the poet calls attention to his task of trying to find words adequate to express Zion's pain, that he might comfort (2:13) her in some way. (And it perhaps reflects a recognized connection between Lamentations and Isaiah 40:1-2.) The targum intuits the need for a response to Zion's accusations already in 1:16. The theme becomes more central and unmistakable in the next major supplement to biblical Lamentations that I will consider, Targum Lamentations 2:20.

LAMENTATIONS 2:20

Another crucial passage for my reading of Lamentations was Zion's final speech of 2:20-22, in which she responds to the exhortation of the poet to affront God with the suffering of the children in order to elicit a response. The text of 2:20 reads:

Look, O Lord, and pay attention to whom it is
          you have so ruthlessly afflicted!
Alas! Women are eating their offspring,
          the children they have borne!
Behold how priest and prophet are slain
          in the sanctuary of the Lord.

In my reading of the passage in chapter two … [in Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations], I suggested that those whom Yhwh has “so ruthlessly afflicted” are the children of the line immediately following. Noting the recurrence of the image of children at the end of 2:22, I argued that the image of children served as a symbolic condensation for the figures of “priest and prophet, youth and maiden” that came between the two verses. The image of children bracketed the description of the inhabitants of the city.

The targum to Lamentations makes a number of significant changes in 2:20 compared with the Masoretic text:

Look O Lord and pay attention from heaven: Whom have you afflicted like these? Is it right that from starvation the daughters of Israel should eat the fruit of their wombs, delicate children wrapped in linen swaddling cloths? The Attribute of Justice replied and said, “Is it right to kill priest and prophet in the temple of the Lord, as you killed Zechariah son of Iddo the High Priest, a faithful prophet, in the Temple of the Lord on the Day of Atonement, because he reproached you, that you should not do wrong before the Lord?”

The first thing to notice is that the targum—apparently taking the reference to cannibalism literally rather than as the literary trope that it most likely is—makes it clear that the daughters of Israel ate their children “from starvation,” thereby deflecting some of the blame (however slightly).³⁶ But more importantly, the targum reads this verse as though it were a dialogue, with the second half of the verse placed in the mouth of the divine Attribute of Justice.³⁷ The importance of this is twofold for my reading of Lamentations. First, it shows that the targum, like my reading, recognized that the focus of Zion's concern in the biblical text was the children—it is indeed these to whom Yhwh has been so ruthless. The last line of the verse, concerning priest and prophet, is effectively separated off by attributing it to another speaker, thereby leaving the focus of the first half of the verse solely on the children; though by this move the targum has lessened the effect of the children as summary figures for the inhabitants of the city. Second, the targum, more explicitly than in 1:16, senses the unfulfilled need for a response from God to the charges of Zion. According to my reading, the rhetoric of Lamentations was geared toward eliciting a response from God, with the fate of the children utilized here because this is what earlier achieved the desired result from the poet. Targum Lamentations supplements the biblical book with an answer from the divine at just this moment when the absence of God's voice is most prominent.

The answer given is, in my judgment, a non sequitur in light of the nature of Zion's appeal. The Attribute of Justice replies to the question of whether it is right for Yhwh to cause the cannibalizing of children by asking a question in return and by bringing into the conversation the stoning of the prophet Zechariah (2 Chron. 24:15-22) by the people of Israel.³⁸ It is not even clear that the reference to Zechariah is meant to be a justification for the “punishment” now meted out on Israel. The Attribute of Justice does not say “Because of this …” It seems rather to be a case of competing accusations, in the form of rhetorical questions, i.e., “Who has done the worse deeds?” And if the implication of punishment is to be seen here, the Attribute of Justice's response is no response at all. Zion in Lamentations was little concerned with why the punishment was taking place, and made no claims for the sinlessness of the people. She was more concerned with the survival of the children, the barbarous treatment of whom precludes any justification or theodic settlement.

LAMENTATIONS 2:22

The next major supplement in the targum grows out of just this need in Lamentations for the issue of the children's survival to be addressed. The text of 2:22, the final verse of Zion's speech, reads:

You called, as on a festival day,
          attackers from all around.
On the day of the Lord's wrath,
          there were none who survived or escaped;
those whom I bore and reared,
          my enemies have consumed.

As noted above, this speech (like the book as a whole) ends on a somber and disturbing note. There are no survivors among Zion's children.

The targum to 2:22 has only one major supplement, but it is a supplement of great consequence. The targum reads:

You will proclaim freedom to your people the house of Israel, by the hand of the messiah king, as you did by the hand of Moses and Aaron on the day that you brought forth Israel from Egypt. And my youths will gather all around from every place where they were scattered on the day of your fierce anger, O Lord, when there was no escapee or survivor among them. Those whom I had wrapped in linen, and those whom I had nourished with regal delicacies, my enemies consumed.³⁹

The transformation from the original text is striking. The festival day of biblical Lamentations, so bitterly ironic in its original context, is here transformed into the day of messianic redemption. And the enemies who had gathered from all around in the book of Lamentations become in the targumic version Zion's children gathering “around and around” her. Though the changes are extensive, they are not random or purposeless. Churgin holds that the midrashic element here is “obviously a sign of later addition” to the peshat (or literal meaning) of the original targumic text.⁴⁰ Levine argues instead that the targumist “struggled to inject a positive note,” and that the reference to messianic redemption was generated by “the juxtaposition of ‘the day of your wrath’ and ‘slaughtered’ with ‘as to a festival.’”⁴¹

I agree with Levine that one cannot so easily separate the interpretive from the literal—the derash from the peshat—in the targum, and that this particular supplement is indeed generated by the text itself. But in my judgment, it is generated not merely from a juxtaposition of images, but from the inherent (but frustrated) drive, found in Lamentations, for the survival of the children. In reference to Benjamin's essay on translation, Derrida writes:

And if the original calls for a complement, it is because at the origin it was not there without fault, full, complete, total, identical to itself. From the origin of the original to be translated there is fall and exile.⁴²

The targumist (consciously or not) apprehends this lack and supplies the midrashic complement for which “the original calls.”⁴³ While focusing on the first half of this complement/supplement,⁴⁴ which deals with the hoped-for messianic king, Levine misses the fact that this theme is introduced as a means to imagine the survival of the children. The addition begins with the messianic hope, but leads to the climax where “my youths will gather together from every place where they were scattered on the day of your fierce anger, O Lord.” The source for this phrase is likely Ezekiel 34:12, where God is portrayed as a shepherd seeking out a scattered flock: “I will rescue them from all the places to which they were scattered on a day of cloud and gloom”. If this is the case, and the nearly precise lexical equivalency suggests that it is, then the messianic reference in the targum may be tied to this citation of Ezekiel 34. For later in the chapter Yhwh promises to appoint “a single shepherd to tend them: my servant David” (34:23). The promised restoration of a Davidic king in Ezekiel 34 is carried over into the targum as the hope for a messianic king. The targum's move to imagine the children restored is all the more bold in its placement alongside the original statement that “there was no escapee or survivor among them.” How can children return when there was no survivor in the first place? The targum is not bothered by the logical inconsistency. (Indeed, there is a sense in which—since it is the very lack articulated by the original statement that generates the supplemental counterstatement—the former must be preserved to justify the existence of the latter.) Survival for the targum is imagined “as if we had a future”; survival is “to live again.”⁴⁵

While the targum, on this reading, is concerned to complete the lack (what Derrida appropriately calls “the fall and exile”) of the original, it too is frustrated. This is most obvious, I think, in the clash between what is said by the Attribute of Justice in verse 20 and what is said by Zion in verse 22. Consider now the complete passage of 2:20-22 in Targum Lamentations:

Look O Lord and pay attention from heaven: Whom have you afflicted like these? Is it right that from starvation the daughters of Israel should eat the fruit of their wombs, delicate children wrapped in linen swaddling cloths? The Attribute of Justice replied and said, “Is it right to kill priest and prophet in the Temple of the Lord, as you killed Zechariah son of Iddo the High Priest, a faithful prophet, in the Temple of the Lord on the day of Atonement, because he reproached you, that you should not do wrong before the Lord?”

The young and the old, who used to lie on silken pillows and ivory couches, slept in the dirt of the streets. My girls and boys have fallen, slain by the sword. You have slain in the day of your wrath. You have slaughtered and did not pity.

You will proclaim freedom to your people the house of Israel, by the hand of the Messiah king, as you did by the hand of Moses and Aaron on the day that you brought forth Israel from Egypt. And my youths will gather all around from every place where they were scattered on the day of your fierce anger, O Lord, when there was no escapee or survivor among them. Those whom I had wrapped in linen, and those whom I had nourished with regal delicacies, my enemies consumed.

Both speaking voices address a lacuna in the original: the Attribute of Justice tries to provide the divine response that was missing in the original, and Zion imagines the return of her children that was unimaginable in the original. While attempting to fill the same lack in Lamentations that produced the response in Second Isaiah, the targum does so in a strikingly different way. In the targum the positive element, the messianic restoration of children, is spoken only by the voice of Zion. This is what Zion wants to hear from Yhwh, and it is basically what the Zion figure in Second Isaiah does hear.⁴⁶ But unlike the rhetorical project of Second Isaiah, the concern of Targum Lamentations does not seem quite so focused on “comfort.” The voice of the divine in the targum is more harshly critical than the voice of the divine in Second Isaiah. But this contrast in the divine voice between the two “survivals” of Lamentations points also to an interesting contrast in the respective voices of the Zion figures. [In] Second Isaiah the voice of Zion is largely eliminated by God's extended responses to her. She has become, unlike the persona of Zion in biblical Lamentations, a passive figure. However, the divine refusal to comfort in Targum Lamentations seems to allow room for a revitalized Zion figure. Thus one finds here again a bolder, more impassioned Zion than in Second Isaiah, one who states right back to the divine that “you will proclaim freedom to your people …” Though not explicitly identified as a request, it is possible to read this statement in Targum Lamentations 2:22 in such a way. It is also possible, however, to read it as an imperative to God. In either case, Zion takes it upon herself to give voice to the restoration that God has avoided speaking of, and by doing so refuses the divine Attribute of Justice the last word.

Though both voices in the targum text of 2:20-22 are produced by a lacuna in the original, the gap between them produces another lacuna, or at least a conflict of interpretation. The voice corresponding to Zion in the Masoretic text continues her emphasis on survival and accusation of God and deemphasizes notions of sin and punishment; but the Attribute of Justice presents just the opposite perspective. Thus one finds a text in conflict with itself, a situation not unlike the book of Lamentations itself. If one follows Benjamin's notions of translation, this is to be expected: “both the original and the translation [are] recognizable as fragments of a greater language.”⁴⁷ But this greater language, or “pure” language, “does not exist, except as a permanent disjunction which inhibits all languages as such.”⁴⁸ Fragments engender their survival in other fragments, whose existence is just as incomplete and precarious. The survival of literature is not a clean, decisive process, but is rather a complex process of growth and mutation. The result is not a finished product, but a stage in the afterlife of literature.

THE TERMS OF SURVIVAL IN TARGUM LAMENTATIONS

It is clear that Targum Lamentations, like Second Isaiah, is significantly aware of the challenges voiced by Zion in Lamentations 1 and 2, and it attempts to address them in a manner similar to Second Isaiah. However, as I hinted in the introduction to this [essay], there are significant differences in these two “survivals” of Lamentations. While Second Isaiah is looking buoyantly forward to the restoration of Jerusalem and the return of the exiles, the targum comes in the aftermath of the destruction of the second temple. As the decades of the Babylonian exile (the context of Second Isaiah) turn into the centuries of the diaspora (the context of the targum), the rhetoric of survival must take on new forms to meet this new sociohistorical context. So it is no surprise that, while the supplement to 2:22 valiantly imagines the return of Zion's children, it can do so only in a postponed messianic era. The buoyancy of the expected restoration in Second Isaiah is replaced in the targum by the need for “constituting a nation-in-exile.”⁴⁹

It is noteworthy that in articulating this project the targum has focused its interpretive energies most intensely on chapters 1 and 2. The reason for this, in my judgment, is that chapters 1 and 2 are the locus of the theological “action” in Lamentations. These chapters mount the most sustained challenge both to Yhwh and to the reader, and these chapters are more insistent than the rest in their demand for an answer. As is clear from the review of scholarship in the introduction, this judgment about the importance of chapter 1 and 2 flies in the face of much twentieth-century scholarly work on the book, which has tended to find its critical purchase in the male figure of Lamentations 3. Levine follows this line of thinking in his analysis of the theological bent of the targum, which he deems to be the locus classicus in targumic literature for any theology of exile. Levine focuses on one of the few interpretive expansions outside chapters 1 and 2 of the targum—the gloss on 3:27-28, which reads:

It is good for a man while young to train himself to bear the yoke of the commandments. Let him sit alone and keep silent, bearing the sufferings that come upon him for the sake of the unity of the name of God, these being sent to punish him for the minor infractions that he commits in this world, until He have mercy upon him and remove them from him. He may accept him purified in the world-to-come.⁵⁰

Levine argues that here we find the “theological self-definition of Israel in exile.” Not surprisingly, given his decision to focus on this particular gloss, he deems this theological self-definition to be that of a “suffering servant accepting the yoke of God's commandments and the suffering borne for the sake of declaring God's unity.”⁵¹ Neither should it be surprising, in light of my focus on the figure of Zion in chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations and Targum Lamentations, that I find Levine's statement reductionistic. Given the extent to which Targum Lamentations itself focuses on chapters 1 and 2, it is certainly necessary to include these chapters in any articulation of the theological self-definition of Israel in exile. And the figure that stands out in this case is, of course, personified Zion.

Having said this, one must ask what difference it would make to include Zion, along with the suffering man of chapter 3, as a model for response to exile. Most significant is the resultant challenge to the notion of quiet acquiescence to suffering. In place of a “suffering servant accepting the yoke” placed on him by God, this model valorizes the bold challenges of Mother Zion on behalf of her children. That is, this model articulates a resistance to both the fact of exile and the theological justification of exile. This is not to claim that the targum presents a radical subversion of the ubiquitous rabbinic concept of the deservedness of punishment;⁵² but it is to claim that Shinan's judgment—concerning the larger nature of the targum as institution—that “the doctrine of retribution is grasped and espoused in its most simplistic form, without the least reservation or questioning”⁵³ is fundamentally inadequate as a characterization of Targum Lamentations. One may admit that the targum is in fact reluctant to pursue the more radical imprecatory rhetoric of Zion in the Masoretic text of Lamentations without having to say that it is “direct, simple, manifestly didactic, and free of doubts and qualifications.”⁵⁴ The targum is instead quite subtle and discerning in its recognition—and exposition—of the drive for survival in the biblical book of Lamentations. Generalized characterizations of a monolithic rabbinic doctrine of suffering or exile are inadequate. Rabbinic texts, like nearly all texts I would argue, are sites of ideological conflict, wherein the attentive reader may legitimately tease out readings counter to the generalized characterizations. …

Notes

1. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 72.

2. Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” 84.

3. See my treatment in chapter two [in Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentations] of the poet's use of the keyword “pouring out” in the book of Lamentations.

4. Benjamin, “Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 10.

5. Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines,” 134.

6. Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Bloch, 1930), 112.

7. On the rabbinic rules governing targum, see Avigdor Shinan, “Live Translation: On the Nature of the Aramaic Targums to the Pentateuch,” Prooftexts 3 (1983): 41-49; and Philip S. Alexander, “The Targumim and the Rabbinic Rules for the Delivery of the Targum,” in Vetus Testamentum Supplement 36 (Salamanca Congress Volume), ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985).

8. Alexander Samely, The Interpretation of Speech in the Pentateuch Targums (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992), 158.

9. Ibid.

10. Samely (ibid., 160-62) makes this feature of targum very clear by comparing Pseudo-Jonathan's rendering of Genesis 12:10-13 with the Genesis Apocryphon XIX, 10-20. The targum builds around the Hebrew narrative, leaving it essentially intact, while the Genesis Apocryphon completely rewrites the narrative, retaining little of the original Hebrew wording or sequence and even changing the point of view from third to first person, something the targum would never do.

11. John Bowker, “Haggadah in the Targum Onkelos,” Journal of Semitic Studies 12 (1967): 13.

12. Alexander Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic, vol. 4B, The Targum and the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 21.

13. Waxman, History of Jewish Literature, 1:118.

14. Ibid.

15. Etan Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1976), 14.

16. Samely, Interpretation of Speech, 181.

17. Benjamin, “Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” 12.

18. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 71.

19. Ibid.

20. Shinan, “Live Translation,” 44.

21. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” Semeia 54 (1991): 20.

22. Ibid.

23. Philip Alexander, “The Textual Tradition of Targum Lamentations,” Abr-Nahrain 24 (1986): 2, however, has urged caution in fixing too certainly the provenance of Targum Lamentations, noting that while it contains some Greek loan words and much Palestinian Aramaic, thereby indicating a Western origin, it also contains Onquelos-type Aramaic and certain words otherwise unattested in Palestinian Aramaic. And while Maimonides and other medieval scholars referred to Targum Lamentations as “Targum Yerushalmi,” there is also a medieval tradition that at least some of the targumim to the Writings originated with the Babylonian scholar Rav Joseph.

24. Albert van der Heide, The Yemenite Tradition of the Targum of Lamentations (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 35; Alexander, “Textual Tradition,” 8-9.

25. Alexander, “Textual Tradition,” 7.

26. Of the two, van der Heide's is the superior. Though basing his edition on the Yemenite Text, Sperber (Bible in Aramaic, vol. 4A) imports expansions from the Western Text, thereby conflating the two distinct recensions. He also makes numerous mistakes in copying the British Library manuscript Or 2375, which are identified in appendix 2 of van der Heide, Yemenite Tradition, 53-55.

27. Most egregious is his identification of an Esther Scroll, “Salonika, University I (1532),” as a Lamentations manuscript. As van der Heide (Yemenite Tradition, 58) first deduced, the siglum “S” in Levine's original papers must have stood for “Sperber,” since the variants he lists as deriving from the Salonika manuscript (under the siglum “S”) in fact reproduce Sperber's 1968 edition of the Yemenite Text. See also Alexander, “Textual Tradition,” 6.

28. Alexander, “Textual Tradition,” 10.

29. See the article by Christian M. M. Brady, “Targum Lamentations 1:1-4: A Theological Prologue,” forthcoming in Targumic Studies, vol. 3. I am grateful to the author for providing a prepublication version of this article.

30. See Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 6 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968), 96, for the midrashic reference.

31. Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations, 20.

32. Westermann, Lamentations, 135.

33. Translations from Targum Lamentations in this … [essay] are my own, based on Etan Levine's edition of the Western Text, though on occasion I will make reference to Albert van der Heide's edition of the Yemenite Text. All emphases are mine and serve to highlight the targumic expansions to the biblical text.

34. Interestingly, while deleting the second repetition of “my eye,” the targum replaces it with the phrase “like a spring of water,” thereby maintaining the intensifying quality of the repetition.

35. Actually, the Hebrew word for “my life”, present in the second italicized addition, is also present in biblical Lamentations as the object of the verb “to restore”. In the Western recension of Targum Lamentations it is separated from the lexical equivalent of the verb, and recontextualized as the object of a second verbal phrase missing from the biblical text.

36. The Yemenite recension refers to “women” rather than “the daughters of Israel”, and it lacks the qualification “from starvation”.

37. The Attribute of Justice is in rabbinic thought a quality of God, though it sometimes is personified as though it were distinct from God, as happens here in Targum Lamentations. Elsewhere it is even portrayed as addressing God (b. Shabbat 55a). The Attribute of Justice is often presented in relation to the Attribute of Mercy. According to a midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (12:15), both attributes were involved in the creation of the world; had either been missing, the world could not have endured. A very interesting variant occurs in a group of Yemenite manuscripts of Targum Lamentations, which substitute “the Attribute of Mercy” for the Attribute of Justice in this passage.

38. The avenging of the death of Zechariah is a popular midrashic motif. Variations on it can be found in Eikhah Rabbah II, 23, and the Talmud (b. Yoma 38b). In the New Testament (Matt. 23:35; Luke 11:51) Jesus makes similar use of the figure of Zechariah.

39. It should be noted that the final line of 2:22 in Targum Lamentations, though not a major supplement, expands the final line of the biblical text by adding a prepositional phrase to each verb. Thus, the phrase “those I clasped / dandled” becomes the targum's “those I clasped / wrapped in linen,” and “those I raised up” becomes “those I raised up on regal dainties.” The additions serve to emphasize the care with which the children were treated previously, and to contrast more starkly with their present fate.

40. Cited in Levine, The Aramaic Version of Lamentations, 15.

41. Ibid., 121.

42. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” 20.

43. This is similar to the understanding of midrash offered by Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 15, in which “[t]he dialogue and dialectic of the midrashic rabbis [are] understood as readings of the dialogue and dialectic of the biblical text.”

44. Derrida writes here about a “complement” in similar terms that he uses for his notion of “supplement” elsewhere. See esp. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 313.

45. Robert Detweiler, “Overliving,” Semeia 54 (1991): 240.

46. Note too that the reference to restoration in Ezekiel 34 is spoken by Yhwh in the first person, but as it is brought into the targum it is transformed into the speech of Zion.

47. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 78.

48. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, 92.

49. Etan Levine, The Aramaic Version of the Bible: Contents and Contexts (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 174.

50. Ibid., 178.

51. Ibid.

52. The idea of punishment is well represented in the opening verses of Targum Lamentations, which offer explanations for the destruction based on the history of Israel's disobedience to Yhwh. But this in no way lessens the later passages that do not fit into this notion of retribution. The expansions in these opening verses do not have to be read as setting the tone for how the entire targum is to be read (so Brady, “Targum Lamentations 1:1-4”). Rather they reflect the tone of the opening verses of the Masoretic text of Lamentations, which does not hold sway for the entire book.

53. Shinan, “Live Translation,” 46.

54. Ibid., 47.