Targum Onkelos

English

And the LORD called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Hebrew / Aramaic

Sefaria, 'Onkelos Genesis' · pd

Notes

Added at Phase 6. Onkelos was cited twice on this daf — by the Pseudo-Jonathan note and by the answer gloss — and was not on it: the plain targum renders the cardinal exactly, yoma chad, and then yom tinyan for the second day, so the Aramaic preserves the unevenness as the Greek and the Vulgate do — and preserves a second unevenness of its own that no other version has, since yoma chad is determined and yom tinyan is not. It interprets nothing here at all, which is the point: of the three targums only Neofiti ever adds a doctrine, and it does not add one to this verse either. Etheridge's 1862 English, fetched from archive.org for this phase, prints 'Day the First' and then 'the Second Day' — see the Pseudo-Jonathan note; the cardinal is restored here in a fresh draft for the same reason.

Threads

• ← echoes · Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
  Phase 6. Pseudo-Jonathan keeps Onkelos's yoma chad unaltered and then expands the clause it sits in, giving the day to labour and the night to rest — an expansion of the reason and not of the number. Where the targum that adds most adds nothing to a word, the word was not felt to need help.
• → parallel · The Seventy
  Phase 6. Onkelos's yoma chad and the Seventy's ἡμέρα μία, with yom tinyan and δευτέρα after each: two independent translators out of one Hebrew, and both let the unevenness stand rather than regularise the series. Every Latin argument in this crux descends from a Greek decision that an Aramaic translator had already made on his own.