Translation within the biblical tradition

As pointed out earlier, the Bible was from the first a palimpsest of languages and contexts. The Hebrew Bible did not evolve in a cultural vacuum, but as a sort of translation from and commentary (often in highly critical terms) upon the older literatures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, and other parts of the Near East. After the return from the exile at the latest, it became necessary to follow readings from the Hebrew text with an ‘interpretation’ in Aramaic (this seems to be the point of Ezra 8:8), and from about the third century BC on these Aramaic ‘Targums’ came to be written down in continuous form. The surviving manuscripts of the Targums were transcribed between the seventh and the sixteenth centuries AD and certainly include some very late elements, but most scholars believe that they give a good general impression of Jewish understanding of the Bible at about the time of Jesus, if not much earlier. To get some idea of their importance, compare the following passage from a Targum of Isaiah 53 with any translation of the Hebrew: