The Many Quarrels of Cain and Abel: A Targumic Expansion Reconsidered

Abstract

Various Targums to the Pentateuch include an expansion to the biblical story of Cain and Abel, where the two brothers engage in a debate concerning divine justice and providence. The contents and form of the targumic debate vary widely, and its textual problems and possible theological and historical contexts have been discussed extensively. In this paper, I reconsider the relationships between the different versions of the debate in light of previously unnoticed textual evidence, primarily from textual witnesses of Targum Onqelos. I show that the Palestinian Targum tradition conflates, in different ways, two alternative versions of the debate, whereas some witnesses of Onqelos preserve only one of these versions in a slightly different form. I conclude that these witnesses preserve a source which was also used by the PalTg tradition and are not derived from the PalTg sources at our disposal.