Texts in Conversation
The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew may have been influenced by Aramaic traditions later preserved in the Targums, where God is called Father and prayers ask for daily needs, forgiveness, and protection.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Matthew 6:9
New Testament
7 When you pray, do not babble repetitiously like the Gentiles because they think that by their many words they will be heard. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 So pray this way: “Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored, 10 may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our debts, as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
Date: 70–90 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
Neofiti Exodus 1:19
Targum
17 But the midwives feared before the Lord. They did not do what the king of Egypt had told them; they kept the children alive. 18 The king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this and kept the children alive?” 19 The midwives told Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women are unlike the Egyptian women; they are vigorous. Before the midwife reaches them, they pray before their Father in the heavens. He answers them, and they give birth.” 20 The Lord showed kindness to the midwives, and the people increased and became very strong.
Date: 300–1000 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... the Fragments Targum was consciously composed as a collection of variants, by rabbis whose primary language (and whose community's primary language) had ceased - essentially since the Arabic conquests - to be Aramaic. It would be odd not to find later (sometimes esoteric) conceptions developed within it. On the other hand, we also may not assume that the Fragments Targum simply inflates prior developments such as are reflected in Neofiti, since the reference of Deuteronomy 33:24 does not appear there, although the haggadah does (in the Vatican manuscripts). In the same connection, it should be pointed out that the Targum called Pseudo-Jonathan, from the seventh century, does not preserve most of the references cited above, although it does present analogous renderings at Exodus 1:19; Deuteronomy 32:6, and an innovative usage at Deuteronomy 28:32, 33, where it is a question of praying to God with good works in one's hands for release in judgment. Clearly, as we come to later sources, there is a tendency both to embellish and to qualify the notion of God as 'father' ..."
Bruce Chilton, “God as ‘Father’ in the Targumim, in Non-Canonical Literatures of Early Judaism and Primitive Christianity, and in Matthew,” in The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Craig A. Evans, JSPSup 14 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 151–169.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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