The Targum Question

A careful reader — especially one who knows the scholarship — will have a sharp objection ready, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a buried footnote. It goes like this:

"You've named your whole reading after the 'Memra' of the Aramaic Targums. But scholars who study those Targums say the Memra was just a reverential buffer-word — a pious way to avoid saying that 'God' did something too human, like walking in a garden. It wasn't a who. And besides, the Targums you're quoting (Neofiti, Onkelos, Pseudo-Jonathan) were written down after the New Testament. So you've built a doctrine on a word that doesn't mean what you need it to mean, from documents too late to prove your point."

That objection is serious, and parts of it are simply correct. So let me tell you exactly what this book claims about the Memra and the Targums — and, more importantly, what it does not.

What the scholarship actually says — both sides

The honest situation is that scholars divide here, and I'm not going to pretend they don't:

• One school — still the mainstream of Targum scholarship, with G. F. Moore its classic voice — reads the Targumic Memra as exactly what the objection says: a reverential circumlocution, a buffer to soften anthropomorphism, with no distinct entity behind it.
• Another school — a forceful minority revival, Daniel Boyarin most prominently, building on Alan Segal — reads it far more richly: the Memra, with Wisdom and the Logos, belongs to a real strand of Second-Temple Jewish thought that could hold a second divine figure — the same strand the rabbis later policed as "two powers."

I am not going to settle a two-thousand-year scholarly dispute in an appendix, and I don't need to — because my claim does not depend on which school is right.

What this book is not doing

It is not resting on what the Targumists meant. If Moore is right and the meturgeman intended nothing but a reverent buffer, my reading is untouched. I am not arguing "the rabbis who wrote the Targums believed in the Memra-made-flesh." They plainly did not.

And it is not arguing that John borrowed his Logos from the written Targums — which is why the late dating of Onkelos and Pseudo-Jonathan doesn't bite. I'm not claiming a documentary chain from a fifth-century manuscript back to the first-century apostle.

What it is doing

Two things, and only two.

First, the Targum is a witness, not a foundation. It witnesses to one historical fact that the dating dispute doesn't touch: by the time of the synagogue readings, Israel already had a word — Memra — for the One who walks, speaks, covenants, and appears as YHWH-yet-encounterable. The category was current. That's all the witness has to carry, and it carries it whether the word was a buffer or more. I treat the Targum exactly the way this series treats Enoch and Jubilees: a witness to what was in the air, never an authority over the text (Deuteronomy 4:2 stays visible — nothing added to the canon, nothing subtracted). The word is borrowed; the reading is not built on it.

Second — and this is the load-bearing point — the claim rests on the Tanakh, not the Targum. The appearing, speaking, creating Word of YHWH is not something the meturgeman invented; it is something the Hebrew Scriptures show — the One who walked in the garden, wrestled Jacob, called from the bush, filled the temple with glory. Strip every Targum out of this book and the case is unchanged, because the case was never "the Targums teach the Memra." The case is "the Bible shows a God who is both uncontainable and encounterable, and Israel had a word for the encounterable One." The Targum lends the word; the Scripture supplies the thing.

And one personal clarification, since the word is mine to define here

I am not using "Memra" the way the Targumists used it — as a name to avoid speaking God's name, a veil over the too-human. I'm using it for the opposite: the manifestation itself — the one uncontainable God taking a form that can be encountered, that can interact with men, without ceasing to be the one God who cannot be contained. Not a euphemism for distance. The very means of nearness.

So the honest residual is this: whether the Targumic Memra was a hypostasis or a buffer-word is genuinely unsettled, and this book does not need it settled — because it borrows the word, not the meturgeman's metaphysics, and rests its weight on the Tanakh. The objection lands a real hit on a claim I'm not making. The claim I am making stands on the Scripture itself, where it always stood.