The First Source-Critical Bar Mitzvah Speech?

This piece divides the text following Baruch Schwartz, “How the Compiler of the Pentateuch Worked: The Composition of Genesis 37,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation (eds. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 263-278. The piece also has much overlap with Ben Sandler’s TABS essay, “Encountering the Documentary Hypothesis in the Joseph Story.”

Editors’ note: Current scholarship does not assume that Targum Onkelos was written by R. Akiva’s famous convert and student, Onkelos/Aquilas, who wrote the Greek translation of the Bible. Rather, it seems to be a 5^th-6^th century CE Babylonian text of unknown authorship, which was used as the translation in public Torah reading, and was ascribed to the earlier sage of that name.