"... Obscure Words This category, for the Targums, is on the border between translation and interpretation. Every translator, even one committed to a “literal” rendering of the text, must sometimes guess at the meaning of a difficult word or simply translate according to the context, or, as a last resort, simply transliterate. Leviticus 16:14, quoted above, is an example of two different approaches to the problem, and both of them are still in the realm of the sensus literalis. But at a certain point, the Targums begin to weave larger structures of meaning into their informed guesswork. An example is in Psalm 68:7: the obscure phrase, “he brings out the prisoners to prosperity (?)”, appears in Targum Psalms as “[he] brought out the house of Israel, who was bound in Egypt, for the proper (rIcwy) deeds of their fathers.” The targumist comes at the verse from three directions, only one of which is philological. The hapax legomenon calls to mind the common root, and the targumist thought the Hebrew word meant something like “proper, fitting things.” His theological framework suggested that the “proper things” that entailed a freeing of prisoners were the merits of the patriarchs; and then he identified this liberation with the Exodus, which forms the first of a series of historical correspondences the Targum reads out of the Psalm ..."