The Torah had Onkelos. The Prophets had Jonathan. In the synagogue, after the weekly Torah portion was read and translated verse by verse into Aramaic, the reader turned to the haftarah - the selected passage from the Nevi'im, the Prophets - and the same duty of translation applied. The congregation, in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple, lived in an Aramaic-speaking world: from the Land of Israel under Roman and Byzantine rule to the academies of Babylon. Hebrew was sacred; Aramaic was the language you used to buy bread, settle a dispute, tell your children a story.
Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel - named for the great Talmudic sage said to be its author - was the authoritative Aramaic rendering of all the Former and Latter Prophets: Joshua through Kings, and then Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve. Where Onkelos worked with watchmaker precision on the Torah, staying close to the Hebrew word order, Targum Jonathan took more interpretive liberty. A difficult passage in Isaiah could become, in Jonathan's Aramaic, an explanation as much as a translation. Anthropomorphic images of the divine - hands, anger, a face - were smoothed away. Prophecy that pointed toward redemption was sharpened. The Targum was not neutral; it was teaching.
The record
The Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 3a) credits Targum Jonathan ben Uzziel on the Prophets to Jonathan ben Uzziel, a first-generation Tanna and leading student of Hillel the Elder (late first century BCE - early first century CE), who is said to have received the tradition from Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Scholars today date the written, standardised form of the targum to the Babylonian amoraic period - broadly the third to sixth centuries CE - placing its editorial completion in the same milieu as the Babylonian Talmud itself. The text covers the full canon of Nevi'im: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (the Former Prophets), and Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve (the Latter Prophets). The division of Nevi'im into these eight books, and their canonical order, is recorded in Bava Batra 14b.
What Targum Jonathan did to prophecy is one of the most remarkable feats of communal reading in the ancient world. Passages that modern scholars debate for centuries - "who is the suffering servant of Isaiah 52-53?" - are recast in the Aramaic: the servant is read through Israel and its remnant; the kings who are astonished are the nations; the glory belongs to the people. The targumist was not shy. He embedded interpretation into the act of reading, so that every generation that heard the haftarah in synagogue received not just the words of Isaiah but a shaped, rabbinically approved lens through which to hear them. The Aramaic targum became the tradition's first commentary, woven into the liturgical moment itself. You could not unhear it.
The targum's reach was wide and durable. In Yemenite communities - some of the most careful guardians of ancient liturgical custom - the practice of reading both the Hebrew and its Aramaic targum aloud in the synagogue continued well into modern times. In the great academies of Babylon, Sura and Pumbedita, where the Talmud was edited and the Jewish legal tradition consolidated, Targum Jonathan sat beside the Hebrew text as a standard reference. Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040-1105), whose commentary on the Bible remains the most studied in Jewish history, cites Targum Jonathan on the Prophets regularly and treats it as an authoritative reading of the plain sense.
The record
Targum Jonathan on Isaiah 52:13-53:12 - the passage Christians read as a prediction of Jesus - renders the servant through Israel's own story rather than as a lone suffering figure. This interpretive choice is already embedded in the Aramaic text itself, not in later commentary: for example, Isaiah 53:10 in Targum Jonathan reads "It is the will of the Lord to refine and to purify the remnant of his people" rather than the Hebrew "the Lord was pleased to crush him." The textual divergence is analysed at length by Bruce Chilton in The Isaiah Targum (Wilmington, 1987), part of the Aramaic Bible series published by Michael Glazier/Liturgical Press - a standard modern critical edition of the targumim in English translation.
Targum Jonathan is not merely a curiosity of the ancient synagogue. It is one of the oldest surviving records of how Jewish communities understood their own prophets - from inside the tradition, in the living language of the time. To read it alongside the Hebrew is to enter a conversation that began with the destruction of the First Temple, ran through exile and return, and never really stopped: What did the prophets mean? What do they mean for us, now? The targum's answer was written in Aramaic, but the question it carried has no expiry.
