David Shepherd, «The Case of The Targum of Job in the Rabbinic Bible and the Solger Codex (MS Nürnberg)», Vol. 79 (1998) 360-380
It is a well-known fact that even in its earliest edition, an Aramaic translation or targum was amongst the vast and varied material assembled for inclusion in the Rabbinic Bible. But in contrast to the comparative wealth of information we possess regarding the circumstances surrounding its publication, we possess little knowledge with regard to the sources used by Felix de Prato when he took up the task of editing the 1517 Rabbinic Bible for the Venetian publisher Daniel Bomberg. While prior research has shown the importance of the targum text preserved in the Solger Codex (Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg) in any attempt to solve the puzzle of the pre-history of the Rabbinic Bible's targum text, many pieces of this puzzle remain as yet unexamined. The present study locates the targum text preserved in MS Nürnberg (Solger Codex) within the stemmatological framework proposed by D. Stec in the introduction to his critical edition of the Targum of Job. More importantly, the present paper presents decisive evidence (through the detection of editorial errors) that the editor of the first Rabbinic Bible (Felix de Prato) copied his targum text of Job directly from Codex Solger preserved in the Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg.
not easily confused in the square Aramean script, the form of these letters in the cursive script is often very similar and in the case of the marginal targum of 12,6 easily confused. It seems likely that de Prato, after having read the mem of yb)wm (whose cross-stroke is unusually high) and the regularly formed aleph of the same word, then read the cursive mem of Nwrsmty as an aleph by mistake. This error then, which as we have seen would be highly unlikely in the square scripts, seems to provide a further causal link between the marginal material of Nürnberg (in this case as preserved only in Nürnberg) and the text which de Prato used for his edition of the Rabbinic bible.
The final piece of evidence in favour of Bomberg's direct dependence on (at least) Nürnberg's text of the targum of Job is this time to be found not in the margins of Nürnberg, but rather within the body of the text itself. At several junctures in Nürnberg, where the body of the text preserves the suffixed preposition ywmwq a (later?) corrector has crossed out the first w and placed a d above the crossed out letter, producing the more common prepositional phrase ywmdq 42. While, six of the seven occurrences are located in 5 chapters (2125) toward the middle of the book, the first such correction is to be found much earlier in chapter 13 (See Illustr. 5). When we turn to Bomberg, we see that Bomberg agrees with the corrected form of Nürnberg ywmdq is read in place of ywmwq. But in the isolated first occurrence, Bomberg alone amongst the witnesses, preserves the unexpected ywmmq (?). The explanation for this form lies in a combination of sloppy penmanship on the part of the corrector and the fact that this correction occurs both first and in relative isolation from the other examples in the middle of the book. While the superscript d provided by a corrector in 21,08; 21,27 and 21,31 is clear and well-constructed, that which occurs in 13,15 is anything but. (see Illustr. 5). It is scarcely anything more than an arch and with its proximity to the m which follows it immediately in the same word, we can see how de Prato might have taken it as a mem.
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The phenomenon of correction raises one final issue which remains to be addressed. Is it possible that de Prato has relied on