International Organization for Targumic Studies (IOTS) will have
its 6th congress. Person in Charge: Dr. Willem F. Smelik, President of IOTS. For more information of IOTS, see here.

Programme of IOTS

Wednesday 4 Aug, 9:00–10:30, Main Building Hall 10

Keynote Lecture: Steven Fraade, Targum and Multilingualism in Late Antique Judaism and Jewish Society

Wednesday 4 Aug, Session A (11:00–13:00)
Main Building Hall 10

Philology & Methodology
11:00 Shamma Friedman, The Dating of Targum Onqelos
11:30 Shai Heijmans, About the ‘Unreliability’ of the Vocalization of Western Targum-Manuscripts
12:00 Margaretha Folmer, Forms and Uses of the Demonstrative Pronouns in Targum Onqelos
12:30 James K. Aitken, Septuagint and Targum Studies: Historical and Methodological Relations

Wednesday 4 Aug, Session B (14:30–18:00)
Main Building Hall 10

Genre
14:30 Alex Samely, The Targums within a New Description of Jewish Text Structures in Antiquity
15:15 Robert Hayward, ‘Targum a Misnomer for Midrash’? A new typology of the Second Targum of Esther

Afternoon coffee break 16:00

16:30 Philip Alexander, ‘Translation and Midrash Completely Fused Together’? The Form of the Targums to Canticles, Lamentations and Eccleasiastes
17:15 Rocco Bernasconi, A Literary Analysis of the Genesis Apocryphon

Thursday 5 Aug, 9:00–10:30, Main Building Hall 10

Keynote Lecture: Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch, Avoiding Anonymity in the Bible and Beyond

Thursday 5 Aug, Session A (11:00–13:00),
Main Building Hall 10

Exegesis
11:00 Willem Smelik, Targum in Talmud
11:30 Beatrice Lawrence, Jethro and Jewish Identity in Targumic Interpretation
12:00 Chris Brady, The figure of Boaz in TgRuth
12:30 Craig Morrison, dyt[/dyt[and the World to Come in the Syriac New Testament and Targum Neophyti

Thursday 5 Aug, Session B (14:30–18:00),
Main Building Hall 10

Translation Strategies
14:30 Dmytro Tsolin, The Transformation of Poetical Lines of the Song at the Sea (Ex. 15:1–18, 21) in the Targum Onqelos
15:00 Bjørn Olav Kvam, Genesis 14 as Key-text for the Balaam Texts – A Case study of Text-immanent Exegesis in the Targumim
15:30 Gudrun Lier, Translation Techniques in Malachi according to Targum Jonathan

Afternoon coffee break 16:00

Identifying Targum
16:30 Paul Flesher, Identifying the Palestinian Targums: The Case of the Cairo Geniza Manuscripts
17:00 David Shepherd, Can Anything Targumic Come from Qumran? Revisiting Klaus Beyer’s ‘Targums’ of Tobit and Isaiah
17:30 Announcements: NTCS-website

Thursday 5 Aug, 18:00, Main Building Hall 10

IOTS Business Meeting

Friday 6 Aug, 9:00–10:30, Main Building Hall 13

Keynote Lecture: Dineke Houtman, The Use of Paratextual Elements in Targum Research

Friday 6 Aug, Session A (11:00–13:00), Main Building Hall 13

Manuscripts, Reception and Edition
11:00 Luis Díez Merino, A New Complete Aramaic Bible
11:30 Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman, ‘Christian’ Targums in a Targum edition?
12:00 Hector Patmore, The Italian Textual Tradition of Targum Jonathan
12:30 Hans Van Nes, “Rome” in Targum Jonathan and its European Reception

The present study explores the possibility of using variant readings of the Targum of the Prophets to get a better insight into the origin and history of Targum Jonathan. The focus is on two sorts of variant readings: the Tosefta Targums and the targumic quotations in rabbinic and medieval Jewish literature. The chapter on the Tosefta Targums concentrates on variants from the book of Samuel. The chapter on the targumic quotations includes quotations of all the Prophets in early Jewish literature. In the Appendix a full list is given of all quotations of Targums of the Prophets presently known. The book is useful for the study of the genesis of Targum Jonathan as well as for its later developments.

Congratulations to Dineke and Harry! This will be a great resource for all interested in targumic studies and exegetical traditions.

So with the Congress only a year away it is time to announce the call for papers. It is shaping up to be a very good IOTS meeting with Steven Fraade and Dineke Houtman confirmed for two of our three keynote addresses.

Please forward this call and feel free to this link to the Newsletter for Targumic and Cognate Studies site.

International Organization for Targum Studies

Sixth Meeting
HELSINKI, FINLAND
August 4-6, 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 6th meeting of the IOTS will cover a wide range of topics related to Targum Studies:

Philology;
Typology and Genre;
Translation Strategies and Theory;
Exegesis;
Theology;
Text-criticism and Manuscript Studies;
Relationship to  Rabbinic Literature.

We are pleased to announce a call for short papers in any of these categories.  Papers should be of twenty-minutes length, allowing ten additional minutes for discussion. The deadline for paper proposals is September 15, 2009, and March 1, 2010  for the submission of written abstracts.

DATE
The sixth meeting of the IOTS will be held from August 4-6, 2010 in conjunction with the XXth Congress of IOSOT, the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, and other specialized congresses (IOQS, IOSCS, IOMS), to be held from 1st to 6th August 2010 in Helnsinki, Finland. All information on these congresses, registration, accommodation, etc. can be found on http://www.helsinki.fi/teol/pro/iosot/abstracts/iosot.htm.

PAPER PROPOSALS
If you are interested in participating and presenting a paper, please send your proposal (title and/or subject of paper) to:

Dr. Willem Smelik,
willem.smelik @ ucl.ac.uk / willem.smelik @ gmail.com

Dept. of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
University College London
Foster Court, Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT

Please forward this call for papers to any student or scholar you think may be interested.

President of the IOSOT Professor Raija Sollamo

Welcome to IOSOT-congress

The International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT) is happy to celebrate its 60th anniversary and its 20th meeting on 1-6 August 2010 in Helsinki. Scholars from all over the world are invited to attend the lectures, participate in the discussions, and give papers. We also invite you to take part in associated specialized congresses to be held from 29th July to 6th August 2010 in Helsinki.

Read more »»

I will take his contact information directly from the site:

For further information, please contact Prof. S. Kaufman. Please DO NOT send requests for for translations from Aramaic for engagement rings and tattoos!

For information about bodily adornment in Aramaic contact Steve Caruso of The Aramaic Blog.

Dear members of the IOTS and other interested parties,

The IOTS has long discussed the desirability of new editions of (most of) the Targums. A first task, the collection of data on targumic manuscripts, has already started and has come to a promising, even if partial, conclusion at the Theologische Universiteit of Kampen, the Netherlands. Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman came with a proposal for a system of sigla which, if agreed upon and endorsed by the IOTS, could be used in any future studies and editions of the Targums, similar to the sigla nowadays common in the study of the Peshitta. The advantages of a common system are clear to everyone.

At the last meeting of the IOTS it was agreed that we should establish a committee to discuss the format for the sigla of manuscripts, starting with the afore-mentioned proposal. We would therefore like to invite interested scholars to come forward and express any interest that they might have in contributing to this task. The executive body of the IOTS will then discuss the options and decide upon a representative and suitable committee, who will hopefully be able to report their findings at the next meeting of the IOTS in Helsinki 2010.

The contact address is:

Willem Smelik
willem.smelik AT ucl.ac.uk
26 Tenison Road
Cambridge CB1 2DW
UK

With kind regards,
on behalf of the IOTS

Willem Smelik

That started me poking around and while I am sure this is old hat to many of you, I was amazed at how many books on the targumim, current and recent volumes, are readily available there! In full form! Including my own, The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations (although for some reason it is classified as “architecture”). Various volumes of the Aramaic Bible series are there and seem to be complete (some, like mine, are listed as “limited preview” but with 5 minutes of poking around several volumes I didn’t find any missing pages). So if you are looking for quick access to various and important studies on targumic literature and don’t have a library to hand, be sure to check out Google Books.

What we now need is scholars willing to contribute articles to the wiki. I have used the same software as Wikipedia so it should be familiar to folks, but I have set it up so that I have to create an account for each contributor. This should help to ensure the quality of the contributions. If you are interested in contributing please either leave a comment here or email be at cbrady AT targuman.org.

Codex Solger MS 1-7.2° (Solger) of Nürnberg is dated to 1291 and is likely to be the basis for the Rabbinic Bible, prepared by Felix Pratensis and printed in 1517 by Daniel Bomberg and reprinted without Tiberian pointing (and other minor alterations) by Lagarde in 1872. The MS contains the Hebrew text followed verse by verse with the Targum.

Images from the Solger MS:

• Solger MS Images of TgLam
• Solger MS Images of TgRuth

Today was the final day of the XIXth IOSOT Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. A few notes from the meeting.
Vetus Testamentum

• Carol Newsome is the editor to receive submission from North America.
• In the last three years (since the last report to IOSOT) there were 80 some articles and additional short notes for a total just over 120 (sorry, I missed the exact figures).
• Of those articles 30 were from the US, 30 from Israel, just under that from the UK and so on…
• VT is going to add an additional 20 pages per issue to accommodate additional articles.
• They will soon being using Arabic instead of Roman numerals (Yeah!)
• There will be a theme issue one/year. This fall: “Prophecy in Greece, Ugarit, and Israel.”

IOSOT President & the XXth Congress

The new President of IOSOT is the outstanding LXX scholar Prof. Raija Sollamo which means that the 2010 Congress will be held in Helsinki, Finland!

This was an amazing conference and I encourage everyone who can to submit papers and attend. I was particularly encouraged by the number of doctoral students and young scholars (I think I still qualify) who gave excellent papers. So save up your Euros now! Helsinki here we come!