This article challenges the assumption that insofar as the Jewish communities of Babylonia were a ‘people of the book’, their book was a Hebrew Bible. Functionally the Bible that most people would have known was the Aramaic Targum of Onqelos and Jonathan. The Bible’s content—its law, narrative, and prophecy—was culturally mediated through Aramaic. Even in Rabbinic communities, where some had competence in Hebrew that gave them ready access to the original, the lack of formal and systematic study of Miqra may have made the Targum the tradition of first resort for understanding the Hebrew. The situation in the Aramaic-speaking east may not, then, have been all that different from the west, where a Greek Bible shaped the religious identity of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities. This essay is offered as a contribution to the neglected study of the role of Bible translation in the history of Judaism.

本文对以下假设提出了质疑：就巴比伦的犹太社区而言，这是“书中的人”，而他们的书是希伯来语。圣经。在功能上，大多数人会知道的圣经是Onqelos和Jonathan的Aramaic Targum。圣经的内容-法律，叙述和预言-是通过阿拉姆语在文化上进行调解的。即使在犹太教社区中，有些人在希伯来语方面具有一定的能力，使他们能够迅速获得原始知识，但由于缺乏对Miqra的正式和系统的研究，可能使Targum成为了解希伯来语的首选手段。那么，讲阿拉姆语的东部的情况可能与西方完全不同。在西方，希腊圣经塑造了讲希腊语的犹太社区的宗教身份。这篇文章是对被忽视的圣经翻译在犹太教历史中的作用的研究做出的贡献。