The Targums, translating the archaic Hebrew into a contemporary Aramaic, and adding some explanatory material as they did so, eventually became a fixed tradition in their own right. A good many of the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works, and of the Scrolls, consist in large part of new ways of reading the same old texts, of making them available to address the needs of a new generation. The grids of interpretation thus offered constitute the key variations in the first-century Jewish worldview.
