Tehiyyat Ha-Metim: The Resurrection of the Dead in the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch and Parallel Traditions in Classic

The study deals with all those passages in the Palestinian Targums, the Aramaic translations of the Pentateuch, that refer to the Resurrection of the Dead. Of central interest in it is the question to what extent the targumic traditions on a future resurrection of the body or on the fate of the soul after death agree with or differ from corresponding traditions in rabbinic sources. With a few exceptions, the relation between targumic traditions and rabbinic sources has been neglected in targumic studies of the last decades. This may have been caused by the questionable assumptions that (a) the Aramaic of the Palestinian Targums represents the spoken Aramaic of Palestine in the New Testament period, (b) the Palestinian Targums contain an important number of early pre-Christian traditions, and (c) the Palestinian Targums are popular in origin, being written in the vernacular, in contrast with the scholastic, authoritative expositions in the learned rabbinic sources. Harry Sysling first offers a survey of these and other important issues in targumic research of the past and of recent opinions on character, origin and interrelationship of the Palestinian Targums. In the following chapters, the author makes a careful analysis of those passages in the Palestinian Targums that directly by the use of specific terminology, or indirectly by the use of metaphors, refer to the resurrection of the body and to the fate of the body and/or soul after death.