Abraham’s Prayer for Isaac’s Descendants

Targum, meaning “translation,” is the designation for the Aramaic translations of Hebrew scripture (see “Aramaic: The Targumim”). Targum Neofiti is the most complete of the surviving Palestinian, or western, targums. Its name derives from the Roman Collegio di Neofiti (College of the Neophytes, young men who were converts from Judaism), where the manuscript was housed for almost three centuries. This targum contains many narrative expansions of biblical texts based on early interpretive traditions. The prayer of Abraham after the binding of Isaac presented here is very similar in theme and rhetoric to Abraham’s words to God at this juncture in the rabbinic interpretive tradition, as in the fourth-century midrash Genesis Rabbah and the later Midrash Tanḥuma. It is also echoed in the rabbinic liturgy for Rosh Hashanah (see “Poetic Introductions to Malkhiyot, Zikhronot, and Shofarot for Rosh Hashanah”).