Title: The Aramaic Targum to Canticles: Annotated Critical Edition, Annotated Hebrew Translation with Textual and Linguistic Studies (in Hebrew)

Publisher: The Academy of the Hebrew Language

Publication date: December 2025

This book is a revised, updated and expanded version of my doctoral dissertation, written in Hebrew and submitted to the Senate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, and awarded the Allan Bronfman Prize for outstanding dissertation in the humanities, social sciences or law (2022).

The Aramaic Targum to Canticles is an allegorical interpretation of the biblical book of Canticles, composed in a distinctive literary form of Aramaic. It narrates the love relationship between the people of Israel and their God, beginning with the exodus from Egypt and culminating in the eschatological age of the Messiah, while constantly seeking to connect the story with the biblical text of Canticles.

This anonymous and highly creative work of considerable literary and artistic sophistication is extant in more than one hundred manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries and has been translated into numerous Jewish languages, including Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Turkish and Neo-Aramaic. Beyond its obvious exegetical and literary value, this work provides important evidence for the languages, culture, and worldview of medieval European Jewry.

This book presents a critical edition of the work, based on twelve manuscripts, with two critical apparatuses and notes on the text, language, and vocalization. Additional chapters examine major aspects of the composition, including its various textual versions, its language and style in comparison with other Aramaic dialects and corpora, the vocalization methods in selected manuscripts, as well as questions of date and provenance. The final chapter offers a Hebrew translation of the complete Aramaic text, accompanied with notes on language, interpretation, sources, and parallels in classical Jewish literature.