The translation that won erased the ones that spoke

Claim (verbatim)

The Aramaic translation of the Torah comes down as a lopsided victory. Targum Onkelos - terse, literal, Babylonian-authorized - became the Targum, transmitted uniformly and printed beside the text in every Miqraot Gedolot. Against it stood a whole Palestinian targumic tradition, expansive and homiletic, weaving aggadah into the translation: it survives only in scattered and late or accidental witnesses - Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Fragment Targums, the Cairo Geniza targum fragments, and Codex Neofiti, which lay miscatalogued in the Vatican until 1956. Mechanism: a canon selects one form and copies it to saturation while the variant forms, lacking institutional backing, survive only where accident preserved them; the winner's uniformity and the losers' fragmentariness are two faces of the same selection. The measurable signatures are that the Palestinian tradition is far more expansive per verse than Onkelos, and that its strictly Palestinian witnesses cover the Torah only partially where Onkelos covers it completely and stably. Prediction restated: in Sefaria the expansive Palestinian targum (Pseudo-Jonathan) runs at more than double Onkelos's word-count per verse, and the strictly Palestinian fragment-witnesses survive on only a fraction of the Torah's verses - the arithmetic of a translation tradition that was nearly filtered out of existence.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: comparing targum word-count per Torah verse in Sefaria, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (the expansive Palestinian recension) will exceed Targum Onkelos by more than a factor of two (a per-verse expansion ratio > 2.0), while the strictly fragmentary Palestinian witnesses (the Fragment Targums) survive on under half of the Torah's verses (< 0.5 coverage) where Onkelos survives on essentially all - primary clause: the > 2.0 Pseudo-Jonathan-to-Onkelos per-verse word-count ratio; the verdict follows it. The fragment-coverage clause resolves in Sefaria only if those witnesses are digitized, else it defers to Klein's critical editions; the test voids for coverage if Pseudo-Jonathan or Onkelos is under 90% digitized on the Torah.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Sefaria's open Targum Onkelos and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on the Torah - compute per-verse word-counts and their ratio, and map the verse-coverage of the Palestinian fragment-witnesses; where the Fragment Targums and Codex Neofiti are not in Sefaria, Michael Klein's critical editions of the Fragment-Targums and the Cairo Geniza targum fragments supply the coverage map.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The asymmetry is textbook - Onkelos literal, uniform and canonical; Pseudo-Jonathan the most expansive targum; the strictly Palestinian witnesses fragmentary - and Klein's critical editions print the Fragment-Targums' and Geniza fragments' partial verse-coverage, effectively settling the < 0.5 coverage sub-clause from print; Flesher-Chilton state the expansion hierarchy as the field's summary. But the primary clause is the whole-Torah per-verse word-count ratio at the 2.0 threshold, which no publication tabulates: Pseudo-Jonathan's expansion is uneven (enormous in narrative, modest across legal stretches of Leviticus), so whether the corpus-wide ratio clears 2.0 is genuinely uncertain and requires the Sefaria computation.

• M. L. Klein, The Fragment-Targums of the Pentateuch According to their Extant Sources, 2 vols. (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1980)
• M. L. Klein, Genizah Manuscripts of Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: HUC Press, 1986)
• P. V. M. Flesher & B. Chilton, The Targums: A Critical Introduction (Waco: Baylor UP, 2011)
• A. Diez Macho, Neophyti 1: Targum Palestinense, ms. de la Biblioteca Vaticana (Madrid, 1968-1979)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.