The Torah Work, Hermeneutical Teaching and Linguistic Enterprise of Aquila the Proselyte in the Literature of the Sages and in Historical Research
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Summary
The text surveys the many-sided figure of Aquila the Proselyte, drawing a historical distinction between him and Onkelos and analysing his enterprise of translation into Greek, carried out in the spirit of Rabbi Akiva's teaching. The source sketches Aquila's dramatic passage from the status of a Roman nobleman close to the Emperor Hadrian to a life of asceticism and Torah study, presenting his theological dialogues and his stringent halakhic practices. At the centre of the work stands his unique literal method of translation, which subjugated Greek syntax to the Hebrew structure in order to preserve every letter and particle of speech for the purposes of halakhic exegesis. In conclusion, the article stresses how this translation served as a protective wall against early Christian interpretation, a claim confirmed scientifically with the discovery of remnants of the translation in the Cairo Genizah.
The Question of Identity and the Historical Distinction: Aquila versus Onkelos
The question of the historical identity of Aquila the Proselyte stands at the centre of a wide-ranging scholarly and textual controversy, which stems from the close connection and the many cross-references in the literature of the Sages between him and the figure of Onkelos the Proselyte.[1, 2, 3, 4] Within the Talmudic and midrashic tradition there is great fluidity in the use of the two names; whereas the Babylonian Talmud attributes the enterprise of translating the Torah into Aramaic to Onkelos the Proselyte, who worked from the mouths of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua [1, 2, 3, 5, 6], the Jerusalem Talmud and the midrashim of the Land of Israel use almost exclusively the name "Aquila the Proselyte" and attribute to him the translation of the Torah into Greek before those same two Tannaim.[1, 2, 3, 7]
Scholars identify a distinct biographical and literary similarity indicating that some of these traditions underwent a process of merging or borrowing of motifs.[3, 4] Onkelos, whose name is sometimes linked to the Greek name Evangelos, meaning "the herald" [3], displays life lines parallel to those of Aquila, whose name is apparently derived from the Latin name Aquila, meaning "eagle".[3] Both personalities are described as Roman noblemen close to the emperor, both studied with the great sages of the generation of Yavneh, and both divided their father's property with their brothers with extreme stringency, casting the money derived from idolatry into the Dead Sea.[2, 3, 8]
Despite these lines of similarity, modern philological and historical research draws a clear distinction between the two and holds that they are two different historical figures who were active in parallel or close in time.[3, 4] Already in the 16th century the Italian scholar Azariah de' Rossi (min ha-Adumim) proved in his book "Me'or Einayim" that they are two separate persons.[3, 4] This distinction rests on essential differences in the level of mastery of Hebrew and in the methods of halakhic interpretation; whereas the author of the Aramaic translation (Onkelos) displays a deep and integrative familiarity with Tannaitic halakha and with the spirit of the Hebrew language [3, 6], Aquila's Greek translation presents an extreme literal method of translation resting on a forced Greek syntax subjugated to the Hebrew structure.[3, 9, 10]
A distinct historical motive for the creation of these two enterprises was the growing need of the Sages in the Mishnaic period to establish authorised and supervised translations.[3] With the rise of heresy and the spread of Christianity, there arose a real fear that popular translators would insert into the existing translations (such as early Jerusalem targumim or the Greek Septuagint) homilies serving Christian beliefs.[3, 9] Therefore these two learned proselytes were enlisted to create precise, authorised and supervised translations reflecting complete fidelity to the Oral Torah.[3, 9] This work has been analysed extensively by scholars over the generations, foremost among them Rabbi Natan Adler in his scholarly and halakhic introduction to his book "Netina LaGer" on Targum Onkelos.[2]
Imperial Lineage, the Path to Conversion and the Theological Dialogue
According to the biographical tradition brought in Midrash Tanchuma and in the writings of the Church Fathers such as Epiphanius of Salamis, Aquila was a Roman nobleman from Sinope in the region of Pontus (in the north of present-day Turkey), and a close relative (sometimes described as the son of his sister) of the Emperor Hadrian.[2, 3, 4, 7, 10] In the year 128 CE he was given a senior state role on behalf of the emperor: to supervise the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a pagan city named "Aelia Capitolina" and the erection of a pagan temple on the ruins of the Temple.[3, 4, 10] This mission brought him physically and spiritually close to the sages of Israel and to the Jewish sources, and led him to a profound transformation of faith.[3, 4]
The story of his conversion is accompanied by deep political and family drama.[2, 3, 7, 8] Aquila, who feared the extreme reaction of his uncle the emperor, first turned to him with a request for general advice and said that he wished to go out beyond the borders of the state in order to learn the minds of people and to engage in pragmateia (commerce).[2, 3, 7] Hadrian advised him to seek merchandise that was lowly and cast aside in the land, which no one wanted, since such merchandise was destined to rise and gain in value, and in that way he would make a great profit.[2, 3, 7] Aquila took the advice as a metaphorical instruction; he went up to the Land of Israel, began to study Torah and converted.[2, 3, 7]
When Aquila returned to the emperor's court, Hadrian noticed a dramatic change in his physical appearance.[2, 3, 11] The emperor asked him why his face had changed and wondered whether he had lost his fortune in trade or whether someone had harmed him.[2, 3, 11] Aquila replied that he was healthy in body and soul, but that his face had changed because he had taken upon himself the yoke of the Torah and the commandments.[2, 3] He explained to his uncle that he had acted exactly according to his advice: he had sought the lowliest "merchandise" in the world, the Jewish nation, humiliated and trampled under the Roman boot, in the clear knowledge that there is no nation destined to rise and attain eternal life like it.[2, 3] This conversation caused a great stir at the royal court; the Roman official who expressed support for Aquila and justified his step incurred the emperor's wrath, and because of the shame and humiliation he put an end to his life by leaping from the roof of his house.[8]
The dialogues between Aquila and Hadrian also touched on deep philosophical and theological questions.[2, 3, 7] The Jerusalem Talmud relates that Hadrian challenged the Jewish physical-theological conception and asked Aquila whether it was true that the whole world exists and stands upon the spirit.[2, 3] Aquila demonstrated it to him tangibly by bringing camels and loading them with a heavy burden; afterwards he briefly choked them to death, and showed the emperor that although their bodies and limbs were completely whole, they could not stand and carry the burden from the moment the spirit (the breath) had left them, thereby proving the absolute dependence of matter on the spiritual.[2, 3]
A further central subject in the confrontation was the commandment of circumcision, which had been forbidden by the Roman authorities.[3] Hadrian tried to persuade his nephew to learn the wisdom of the Torah without circumcising his flesh.[3] Aquila answered him by means of the class structure of the Roman army: just as the emperor does not grant the royal food allowance and pay (annona) to a soldier (astratliros) unless he carries his weapons and uniform (his arms) with him, so the Holy One, blessed be He, does not grant the depth of the wisdom of the Torah to one who does not bear in his body the seal of circumcision.[3, 7] He supported this with the verse "He declares His words to Jacob, His statutes and His judgements to Israel; He has not done so for any nation", and made clear that the covenant is intended solely for the circumcised.[3, 7]
His Integration into the Circle of the Tannaim and His Halakhic Practices
After his conversion, Aquila entered upon the study of Torah with the great Tannaim of the generation of Yavneh.[2, 3, 7, 11] His first steps were not easy; when he came before Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, he put to him hard questions concerning the status of the proselyte.[2, 3, 11] Aquila wondered whether all of God's praise and promise to proselytes is summed up in the verse "and loves the stranger, giving him bread and clothing" (Deuteronomy 10:18), when he himself possessed many slaves, fields and royal foods flooding his table.[2, 3, 11] Rabbi Eliezer responded with a harsh rebuke and told him that the thing over which our father Jacob struggled, who prayed "and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear", cannot be light in his eyes.[2, 3, 11]
When Aquila went out agitated, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya met him and began to appease him with gentle words.[2, 3, 11] Rabbi Yehoshua gave the words "bread and clothing" a broad hermeneutical interpretation: "bread" is the Torah, of which it is said "Come, eat of my bread", and "clothing" is the tallit of a commandment and the priestly garments given to proselytes who merit marrying their daughters to priests.[2, 3, 11] Rabbi Yehoshua's students wondered at his gentleness and were amazed that he invested such great effort in appeasing the proselyte, but the sages recognised the importance of this approach and determined that were it not for Rabbi Yehoshua's forbearance and patience with Aquila, he might have despaired and returned to his former ways.[2, 3, 11]
Beyond his studies, Aquila adopted extremely stringent halakhic patterns of behaviour, which placed him in the standing of a member of the elite that observed meticulous laws of purity in the Land of Israel.[2, 3] Several testimonies about his way of life have been preserved in the Tosefta:
- The purity of ordinary food: Aquila the Proselyte used to eat his everyday food ("chullin") in the purity of sacred food throughout his life, and took care that his bed and his kerchief were kept at a stringent level of purity equal to the degree of the purification offering.[2, 3]
- Immersion in the sea: on his journeys together with the Nasi Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Kafsai in Ashkelon, whereas Rabban Gamliel preferred to immerse in the local bathhouse, Aquila took care to immerse directly in the waters of the open sea in order to fulfil his obligation according to all the views.[2, 3]
Observance of the laws of purity in his house: Aquila's cooks and assistants were trained in complex laws of purity; the Tosefta describes how his cook brought a special wooden bench (kuftu) before Rabban Gamliel, taking care that it should not become impure.[2, 3]
Complete distancing from money derived from idolatry: when Aquila's father died and he had to divide the property with his gentile brother, he imposed upon himself an extreme halakhic stringency. He refused to derive any benefit whatsoever from the statues and images of idols that were in his father's house, and cast the monetary value of his share of this inheritance into the depths of the Dead Sea.[2, 3, 8]
His warm relations with Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh found prominent expression upon the death of the Nasi.[2, 3] Aquila held for him a magnificent and extraordinary mourning ceremony, in the course of which he burned on his grave precious objects and spices worth seventy Tyrian maneh.[2, 3] When the sages asked him the meaning of this great extravagance, Aquila answered them from the conceptual world of Roman rule: Rabban Gamliel was worthy of this honour, since he was weightier and more important than seventy empty kings of the nations of the world who bring no spiritual benefit to humanity.[2, 3]
His Hermeneutical Teaching: Rabbi Akiva's Method of Translating Words
Aquila's most significant part in the development of the Oral Torah is his great linguistic enterprise, the translation of the Bible into Greek, carried out under the patronage and encouragement of Rabbi Akiva.[4, 7, 9, 10] Rabbi Akiva, who continued and developed the method of Nachum Ish Gamzu, championed a revolutionary hermeneutical conception according to which every letter, every connecting word and every superfluous particle of speech in the biblical text has deep halakhic and conceptual meaning.[9, 10] This approach demanded a translator who would not content himself with conveying the general spirit of the words (as the Septuagint had done), but one who would copy the linguistic body itself without compromise.[3, 9, 10]
To this end Aquila developed a unique translation methodology, which can be defined as "absolute literal translation" or "interlinear translation".[3, 9, 10] He refused to obey the rules of syntax of classical Greek, and instead forced Greek to bend to the structure of the Hebrew word and sentence.[9, 10]
A distinct example of this methodology is the treatment of the word "et".[9, 10] In Hebrew the word serves to mark a direct object, but in the beit midrash of Rabbi Akiva it is expounded as coming to include additional content.[10] In order to preserve this feature in Greek, Aquila translated the word "et" by means of the Greek preposition σύν (whose literal meaning is "with").[9, 10] Thus, for example, the first verse in the book of Genesis:
"In the beginning God created et the heavens and et the earth" (bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz)
Aquila translated into Greek as follows:
Èn kephalaio ektisen ho theos syn ton ouranon kai syn ten gen [10]
This translation, which sounds clumsy and strange to a native Greek reader because of the use of the preposition "with" before a direct object, enabled a Greek-speaking Jew in the Diaspora to identify immediately where the word "et" appears in the original Hebrew text, and thus to learn and expound Rabbi Akiva's halakhic and conceptual expositions directly from the Greek text.[9, 10]
Likewise, Aquila avoided the use of free wording and strove to create rigid linguistic uniformity.[10] He took care always to translate a given Hebrew root by the same Greek root, regardless of the context of the sentence or the degree of its stylistic suitability.[10] This led to the invention of new words in Greek (neologisms) and to the use of unprecedented syntactic structures.[9, 10] In order to express the preposition "le-" (to) in places where the Greek preposition εἰς could not stand grammatically, Aquila used a free inflection of the Greek definite article, thereby creating a precise linguistic code reflecting the Hebrew original letter by letter.[10]
In addition, Aquila preserved the unique sanctity of the Tetragrammaton.[9, 10] Whereas other translations replaced the Explicit Name with the word κύριος ("Lord"), Aquila left the Explicit Name in the ancient Hebrew script (ktav da'atz) within the Greek text.[9, 10] This preserved the theological uniqueness of the Name and prevented Christian readers from attributing the biblical verses dealing with the Deity directly to the figure of Jesus.[9]
A Glossary of Terms and Practical Translations of Aquila in the Literature of the Sages
Several testimonies and examples of Aquila's translations of specific words in the Bible have been preserved in the literature of the Talmud and Midrash.[2, 3, 7, 12] These examples illustrate the way in which Aquila combined linguistic precision with the distinct halakhic rulings of the Sages.[2, 3, 12]
Historical Reception, Christian Polemic and the Genizah Discoveries
The reactions to Aquila's translation ranged from praise and admiration in the Jewish world to criticism and suspicion in the early Christian world.[4, 9, 10]
In the world of the Sages the translation was wholeheartedly embraced.[2, 3, 5] The Midrash and the Jerusalem Talmud extol the beauty and precision of the translation, and note that his teachers saw in it the fulfilment of Noah's prophecy "May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem": the splendid language of Japheth (Greece) found its most fitting dwelling within the tent of Shem (the Torah).[2, 3] The Jews of the Diaspora in the Hellenistic sphere adopted Aquila's translation with great enthusiasm, and it became the official version read in the synagogues of Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt in place of the old Septuagint.[4]
On the other hand, the early Christian Church reacted with sharp hostility to Aquila's translation.[4, 9, 10] Church Fathers such as Irenaeus accused Aquila of an anti-Christian tendency and claimed that his main aim was to neutralise the messianic verses that Christianity used to prove the messiahship of Jesus.[4, 9, 10] For example, Aquila's choice to translate the word "almah" in Isaiah 7:14 as "young woman" (νεᾶνις) and not as "virgin" (παρθένος), as the Septuagint had translated it, was perceived by them as a deliberate attempt to undermine the dogma of the virgin birth.[4]
At the same time, prominent Christian scholars appreciated the scholarly and textual value of the translation.[4, 9, 10] Origen, one of the Church Fathers of the third century, placed Aquila's translation in the third column of his vast work, the "Hexapla".[4, 9, 13] This work contained six parallel columns:
- The original Hebrew text.[13]
- A transliteration of the Hebrew words in Greek letters.[13]
- Aquila's literal translation.[13]
- The translation of Symmachus, which preserves context and a natural Greek style.[13]
- The Septuagint.[4, 13]
- The translation of Theodotion.[4]
For hundreds of years Aquila's translation was considered lost, apart from quotations and isolated fragments from the writings of Origen's Hexapla.[4, 9, 14] The great breakthrough in the study of the figure and his enterprise came in 1897, when Solomon Schechter and his colleagues discovered in the Cairo Genizah in Egypt palimpsest leaves (parchment written on twice after the first layer was erased).[4, 9, 10, 14] In the lower, erased layer of these parchments, dated to the sixth century CE, long passages from Aquila's translation of the books of Kings and Psalms were discovered.[4, 9, 10, 14] These discoveries were published by the scholars Francis Crawford Burkitt (the books of Kings) and Charles Taylor (the book of Psalms).[4]
These physical finds confirmed scientifically and precisely all the descriptions of the Sages and the Church Fathers concerning the character of the translation.[9, 10] The texts uncovered displayed a forced Greek, complete fidelity to the Hebrew word order, systematic use of the Greek preposition σύν to translate the word "et", and the writing of the Explicit Name in ancient Hebrew letters within the Greek sequence.[9, 10] Aquila's translation thus became a research tool of the first rank for modern scholars of the biblical text, who use it to reconstruct the exact Hebrew text that lay before the eyes of the Tannaim in the Land of Israel in the second century CE.[9, 10, 14]
Summary and Historical Conclusions
The work and teaching of Aquila the Proselyte are living testimony to the power of the cultural and spiritual attraction of Judaism in the Mishnaic period, precisely in its darkest hours after the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the revolts by Rome.[2, 3, 8] Aquila's decision to abandon the centres of power and rule of his imperial family and to choose a life of asceticism, purity and Torah study in the Land of Israel illustrates the power of the Yavneh revolution, which set Torah and wisdom as a supreme spiritual alternative to political and military power.[2, 3, 7, 8]
Aquila's translation enterprise served as a double protective wall: on the one hand, it checked the attempts of the early Christian Church to appropriate the biblical text for its own needs, and on the other hand, it preserved the integrity of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities in the Diaspora and kept them connected to the halakha and interpretation of the sages of the Land of Israel and of the beit midrash of Rabbi Akiva.[3, 4, 9] The extreme linguistic methodology he developed, the subjugation of Greek to Hebrew, was not a linguistic surrender, but a conscious theological-hermeneutical choice, intended to prove that the Holy Tongue and its inner structures carry within them a sanctity that cannot be altered or replaced.[3, 9, 10] The physical discoveries of his translation in the Cairo Genizah sealed Aquila's standing not only as an exemplary figure of a righteous proselyte in the literature of the Sages, but also as a scholarly and meticulous translator who left an indelible mark on the study of the Bible and the development of the Oral Torah.[4, 9, 10, 14]
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