The Relationship Between Targum Song of Songs and Midrash Rabbah Song of Songs

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between Targum Song of Songs and Song of Songs Rabbah, and challenges the view that the Targum is dependent on the Midrash.In CHAPTER ONE I set out the problem to be investigated and consider some of the reasons why scholars in the past have assumed that the Targum drew on the Midrash. Having rejected these reasons as inadequate and established the need for a fresh review of the evidence, I describe the approach I will adopt in the present thesis.In CHAPTERS TWO and THREE I introduce the two key texts individually, discussing such background information as their manuscripts, provenance, date, genre, coherence and theology.In CHAPTER FOUR I analyse textual parallelism and its implications, reviewing first some seminal studies of the subject, and then introducing and defending a distinction between one-to-one parallelism and multiple parallelism.In CHAPTERS FIVE and SIX I examine in depth a number of indicative cases of both one-to-one and multiple parallelism between Targum Song and Song Rabbah, demonstrating that direct literary dependency between the one work and the other simply cannot be proved.In CHAPTER SEVEN I set this conclusion in the context of a wider comparison between Targum Song and Song Rabbah, arguing that the hypothesis of literary dependency rests on a model of text-creation and text-transmission that is inappropriate to Rabbinic literature in late antiquity.In a series of APPENDICES, printed for convenience as a separate volume, I provide the texts discussed in the case studies in Chapters Five and Six.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Philip Alexander (Supervisor) & Bernard Jackson (Supervisor)