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.
the codex by which N has been corrected? Willem Smelik, on the basis of his investigation of the relationship between Bomberg and Nürnberg in Targum Jonathan to Judges 5, observes that: a) de Prato follows a text very similar to the corrected text of Nürnberg, rather than the original, but that b) he did not always feel obliged to include a marginal variant reading under the heading )"s 43. Primarily on the basis of this latter observation he quite rightly suggests that the lack of correspondence between Bomberg and the marginal material of Nürnberg allows for the possibility that the witness which was used in the correction of Nürnberg might have been the MS used by de Prato, as opposed to Nürnberg itself.
While both of these observations generally hold for the case of the targum of Job, it seems clear that on the basis of both the idiosyncratic ordering and dislocation of targumim in Bomberg and de Prato's confusion of aleph and mem in the cursive script, there is a demonstrated causal link between the material presented in the margins of Nürnberg and the text included by de Prato in his edition. While much, in fact most, of the marginal material included under the rubric )"s is not included in the text of Bomberg, there are in fact occasions when de Prato has included even entire alternative targumim (28,7T2; 28,8T2) which has been so labelled. And as it is clear that the same hand is responsible for virtually all the marginal material, whether included under the formula )"s or the more usual )"t, it seems more than reasonable to conclude that in the case of the targum of Job at least, there is an inescapable link between the marginal material of Nürnberg and the text of Bomberg and that therefore Nürnberg, and not the codex used in its correction, was the text used by de Prato.
While it is hoped that the evidence above has served to present the case for de Prato's dependence on the text of the targum of Job preserved in MS Nürnberg with sufficient clarity, perhaps it is best to conclude with a brief survey of what I have not shown. Such is our lack of knowledge regarding the sources at de Prato's disposal, that we must allow, at least the possibility (and perhaps probability) that different MSS may have been employed in different ways by de Prato in his production of the various targum texts which are included in the Bomberg Bible. In any case, this study has in no way disproved that other texts were not used by de Prato in his