De-anthropomorphizing God: Did It Really Begin with Onkelos?

In my years spent translating the Guide to the Perplexed with Lenn Goodman, I repeatedly encountered Moses Maimonides’ (1138–1204) understanding of Onkelos:

^{Guide 1:27} Onkelos the Proselyte was highly adept in Syriac and Hebrew. He made it his aim to purge corporealism, substituting fit glosses for any biblical predicate suggesting God’s embodiment. Wherever he finds a term for motion of some kind, he takes it to mean an effulgence of created light manifesting God’s Shekhinah or Providence.^[1]

Thus, as Maimonides notes, where Exodus (19:11) describes the Sinai theophany withיֵרֵד יְ־הֹוָה לְעֵינֵי כׇל הָעָם  “YHWH will come down, in the sight of all the people,” Onkelos translates instead יִתְגְּלֵי יְיָ לְעֵינֵי כָל עַמָּא “God will be revealed in the sight of all the people.” The change implies that Onkelos is uncomfortable with the anthropomorphic depiction of God descending, which implies a body, so the Targum renders it with a term that could apply to an unmoving Deity without a physical form.

To me—and probably to any casual reader of Onkelos’ translation of the Torah, found in many synagogue chumashim^[2]—Maimonides’ explanation that Onkelos was a deanthropomorphizer, rejecting the corporeality of God, made plain sense. In fact, in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions, Saʿadya Gaon (882–942) already presented the Targum as deanthropomorphizing, a perspective on God with which he was aligned. Saʿadya first quotes this as the view of the sages:

...we find that whenever our sages, who were considered trustworthy authorities in regard to our religion, encountered any such comparisons of God to physical beings, they did not translate them in an anthropomorphic sense. They rendered them in such a way as to correspond to the previously established principle.^[3]

Saʿadya does not mention Onkelos by name here,^[4] but he next proceeds to give examples of translating non-anthropomorphically, and all four come from Onkelos’ translation:

^{שמות ט:ג}  יַד יְ־הֹוָה / ^{אונקלוס} מַחָא מִן קֳדָם יְיָ

^{Exod 9:3} The hand of YHWH / ^Onkelos a strike from before God

^{שמות כד:י} וְתַחַת רַגְלָיו / ^{אונקלוס} וּתְחוֹת כּוּרְסֵי יְקָרֵיהּ

^{Exod 24:10} And under His legs / ^Onkelos and under the seat of His glory

^{שמות יז:א} עַל פִּי יְ־הֹוָה / ^{אונקלוס} עַל מֵימְרָא דַּייָ

^{Exod 17:1} By YHWH’s mouth / ^Onkelos By God’s word

^{במדבר יא:יח} בְּאׇזְנֵי יְ־הֹוָה / ^{אונקלוס} קֳדָם יְיָ

^{Num 11:18} In the ears of YHWH / ^Onkelos Before God

In all of these cases, Onkelos renders in ways that avoid attributing human body parts to God. With this in mind, I sat in synagogue for years listening to the liturgical reading of the Torah and simultaneously following Onkelos’ Aramaic translation, and that explanation seemed complete. Then one verse began to trouble me because it was not theological at all.

Collapsing Non-Theological Metaphors

When Pharaoh tells the brothers וְאִכְלוּ אֶת חֵלֶב הָאָרֶץ “you shall live off the fat of the land” (Gen 45:18), Onkelos translates טוּבָא דְּאַרְעָא “the goodness of the land.” I searched through the Targum some more and noticed that he does the same thing in two other places in Genesis in Isaac’s blessing for the synonymous expression שְׁמַנֵּי הָאָרֶץ “the fatness of the earth” (Gen 27:28, 39).

Why does Targum Onkelos dissolve this metaphor? I thought at that time that, in theory at least, “the fat of the land” may be a metaphor that works in Hebrew^[5] but not in Aramaic. I soon noted, however, that the Syriac Peshiṭṭa translates שמינה דארעא (ܫܘܡܢܗ ܕܐܪܥܐ) “fat of the land,” and the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Metzia 105b) uses the expression שמינה ארעא “the land was fat,” which more than suggests that the conceptual metaphor of a “fat” land for a fertile land was at home in ancient Aramaic.

Onkelos’ choice, then, to dissolve the metaphor “fat of the land” in favor of “goodness of the land,” then, may be evidence of a broader, deliberate program eschewing metaphor more generally. That might imply that when Targum Onkelos dissolves metaphors, even about God, it has something more than deanthropomorphizing in its program: the translator appears to prefer semantic clarity to figurative language. In other words, this is part of a literary project rather than a theological one.

Onkelos: A Step Towards the Philosophers

This is not as profound a change as it may seem at first, since the very fact that Onkelos sees God having hands or feet as a metaphor demonstrates that the author does not think of God as corporeal.  Yet, Onkelos does not go as far as Maimonides in depicting God in abstract terms.

For instance, when Leviticus 17:10 warns, וְנָתַתִּי פָנַי בַּנֶּפֶשׁ הָאֹכֶלֶת אֶת הַדָּם “…I will set my face against the person who partakes of the blood.” Onkelos translates this as וְאֶתֵּין רוּגְזִי בַּאֲנָשָׁא דְּיֵיכוֹל יָת דְּמָא “I shall direct my anger that the person who partakes of the blood.” Again, Onkelos has collapsed the metaphor and removed an anthropomorphizing term, but at the same time, it has added an anthropopathizing term, attributing human emotions to God, something Maimonides eschews.^[6]

Rethinking the Origins of Judaism’s Noncorporealist Theology

This led me to a rather new way of thinking about Judaism’s philosophical past: Perhaps Onkelos was not a proto-Maimonidean after all. His translation supplied Saʿadya and Maimonides with precedents that they could understand as evidence of a philosophical theology congenial to their own, but that does not mean that philosophy had produced those precedents in the first place.

The harder philosophical project may belong instead to the Arabic-speaking intellectual world beginning in the early medieval period, where Jewish thinkers such as Saʿadya encountered kalām (Arabic scholastic theology) and made the nature of God an object of systematic philosophical inquiry.

Onkelos, on this reading, belongs to a different project. Translation can never rely just on importing words from one language to another, and even if Onkelos had Aramaic cognates for every word in the Bible, relying on those cognates would not necessarily produce the text he wanted.^[7] Although he sometimes diverges radically from the wording of the Torah, the metaphors Onkelos dissolved were not only theological ones, but metaphors he chose not to preserve—and that distinction changes what we can infer from his choices.

That has changed the way I follow Onkelos in synagogue. I no longer assume, when he removes a hand, a face, or a descent from the biblical text, that I am hearing an ancient philosopher anticipating Maimonides. I see him as an independent writer predating—though supporting—later Jewish scholastic theology.