Elijah's Return in the Targums

Joseph Smith records that when the angel Moroni visited him, he quoted the final verses of Malachi a little differently. So do the Targums:

Will I not send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the future day for the coming of the great and dreadful presence of the Lord? He shall turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers lest it be revealed and I find the whole earth in sin and I smite it with utter destruction.

A number of differences between the Targums and the Hebrew text are telling. In the Hebrew text the day of the Lord is great and dreadful, in the Targums, it is the presence of the Lord that is great and dreadful. In the Targums, God will find the world in sin if Elijah does not turn the hearts of the children to the fathers or the fathers to the children.

In both cases, the consequences of not turning the hearts is utter destruction, though this is clearer in the Targum than in most English translations.

Covenanting with the Word

Targum specialists will point out that many of the Targums avoid any anthropomorphisms that are there in the Hebrew texts. Thus, while the Hebrew text might talk of God having hands or feet or other attributes that humans do, the Targum will phrase it so that these are missing. This extends to interpersonal relations, such as covenants. Two strategies that the Targums use are substituting the expressions "the word of God" and "the presence of God" for "God".

This usage, which was present in the first century, has an influence on Christianity through the Gospel of John.

Some passages that illustrate this tendency, which leads to what appears in John, come from the accounts in Genesis:

And the Lord said: This is the sign of the covenant which I bring between my Word and between you and between every living soul with you forever and ever (Genesis 9:12 Targum Onkelos)

And I will set up my covenant between my Word, and between you and between your sons after you (Genesis 17:7 Targum Onkelos).

 One can see how such paraphrases feed into the Christian notions that the Word was God and that the covenants that Abraham made were with the Word, which the Christians interpreted as Jesus. For Aramaic speaking Jews of the land of Israel, the Christian interpretation would have corresponded with what they learned in the synagogue. The only question was whether they viewed Jesus as the Word of God or not.

A Strange Cut

Students of the Hebrew Bible are familiar with the fact that the expression for making a covenant is "to cut a covenant." Presumably this is because there was a sacrifice associated with the covenant and the death of the sacrificial animal was symbolic of the penalty that would be inflicted on a party that broke the covenant.

Targum Onkelos to Genesis 17:4, however, takes the expression "to cut a covenant" a bit farther than usual:

I will circumcise my covenant with you and you will be a father of many nations.

Genesis 17, of course, is the introduction of the covenant of circumcision, but this passage takes the expression a little further than we are used to.

Repentance for Cain

We typically think of Cain as one of scripture's first lost causes. The readings of the Targums provide some insight into Cain's situation before his turn for the worst. Abel's sacrifice had been accepted but Cain's had not. He was feeling dejected and like he was always under his younger brother's shadow. Genesis 4:7 reads as follows (the parenthesis shows a textual variant):

If you do good, it shall be forgiven you; and if you do not do good, (your) sin is retained until the day of judgment; recompense will be required of you if you do not do good; but if you do good, it will be forgiven you.

In the Targum for this verse (which reflects a first-century Judean understanding of the text) Cain is offered the chance to repent. The terms of repentance offered Cain are:

• He can do good. Doing good shows his repentance. Doing the right thing is what God asked Cain to do.


• Doing good brings a remission or forgiveness of his sins. The Aramaic term here, yištabêq, is the same verb used in the Aramaic version of Psalm 22:1 that Jesus quotes on the cross (the sabachthani in Matthew 27:46), and means to abandon, to desert, or to forgive. If we abandon our sins, God will abandon them as well. Forgiveness in Genesis 4:7 is God abandoning our sins and abandoning keeping track of them. They are not retained for the day of judgment.


• If he does not do good, his sin is retained and he is not rid of it, and it will come back to him at the day of judgment.

Cain was offered a clear choice. He could do good or not. Doing good would count as repentance and bring a remission of his sins. Or he could hold on to his sins.

Cain, however, chose not only to hang on to his sins but magnify them. His envy of Abel, who did well and was accepted, caused him to betray and murder Abel. When confronted with his iniquitous deed, Cain denied it, and rationalized it. He did not even try to repent of his treachery against his more righteous brother.

The Targum does not supply a motive for Cain's actions. The Book of Moses, however, does:

And Cain gloried in that which he had done, saying: I am free; surely the flocks of my brother falleth into my hands (Moses 5:33).

Cain thought that being rid of his pesky righteous brother would make him somehow free to pursue his own agenda. He also confiscated his brother's possessions that he had labored to acquire. They were now his to do with as he pleased. Cain sold his soul for a few flocks.

So in the end, if Cain was a lost cause, his own choices and his own sins made him so.

Living Souls

Genesis 2:7 in the Hebrew says:

And he breathed into his nose the breath of life and the man became a living soul.

The phrase "living soul" occurs throughout the Old Testament, mostly in the early chapters of Genesis, in Leviticus 11:10, 46, and Ezekiel 47:9. A "living soul" is a common trope in Egypt; the phrase occurs in Book of the Dead chapters 85, 130, 134, and 137A, as well as the Daily Temple Litrugy. By the Ptolemaic period, it also appears in Book of the Dead chapters 17, 127, and 153 and in the Document of Breathing Made by Isis.

The difference between the Egyptian use of the term and the Hebrew use of the term illustrates the problem with the verse. In Egyptian, a "living soul" always refers to a person. In Hebrew, it mostly refers to animals (as in Genesis 1:20-24; 9:10-16; Leviticus 11:10, 46, and Ezekiel 47:9), although it can include humans.

The Targum Onkelos, which is a first century Jewish interpretation of the text in Aramaic, reads just a bit differently:

And he blew into his nose the breath of life and it became a speaking spirit in the man.

The Targum alters the text so that man receiving the breath of life sets him apart from the dumb animals. Not just the ability to breathe is at issue, but the ability to talk. Communication becomes the important thing, rather than just inhaling and exhaling.

The Apostasy of Sodom and Gomorrah

The wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah are proverbial. Still, the phrasing of the Targum Onkelos for Genesis 14:4 is amusing:

Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer, and the thirteenth year they apostatized.

The Aramaic term here, maradw, means to rebel but it also means to apostatize. Jews around the time of Jesus who listened to the Targum would have understood it in that sense, but it is not clear that they would have distinguished between rebellion and apostasy the way we do in English. They seem to have had a clearer notion than we do.