antiquity has bequeathed to us, it seems natural that
it should soon have been translated and commented
upon. The official Aramaic translation, or Targum, of
the Pentateuch is attributed to Onkelos and that of the
Prophets ⁶⁰ to Jonathan ben Uzziel. Rashi constantly
draws inspiration from both these works, and possibly
also from the Targumim to the Hagiographa, which are
much more recent than the other two Targumim.
Sometimes he simply refers to them, sometimes he re-
produces them, less frequently he remarks that they do
not agree with the text.

For the establishment of the text Rashi scrupulously
follows the Massorah, the "Scriptural Statistics," the
work of scholars who lived in the period between the
seventh and the tenth century, and who assured the in-
tegrity of the Bible by counting the number of verses
in each book and the number of times each word, phrase,
or expression recurs. The Massorah soon came to have
great authority; and many scholars, such as R. Gershom,
for example, copied it with their own hands in order to
have a correct and carefully made text of the Bible.
The Massorah was Rashi's constant guide. From a
calculation made of the number of times he transgressed
its rules, the infractions do not appear to be numerous,
and sometimes they seem to have been involuntary.
As a consequence, variants from the text of the Bible
are extremely rare in Rashi, and the copyists eliminated
them entirely. In general at his time the text was
definitely established to the minutest details, and vari-
ants, if there were any, were due to blunders of the
copyists. Rashi, who probably carefully compared
manuscripts, once remarked upon such faulty readings

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