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Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 6:4 — Shemhazai and Azael named

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 6:4

The most surprising survival of the Watchers tradition in Jewish literature is hiding in a paraphrase of the Torah.

What a Targum is

A Targum is an Aramaic translation-paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible. They were used in synagogue worship in late antiquity, after Hebrew had stopped being the daily language of most Jewish communities. Most Targums stick close to the Hebrew text. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is the exception. It expands. It paraphrases. It works in stories from the wider oral tradition.

For Genesis 6:1–4 — the cryptic verses about "sons of God" taking "daughters of men" — Targum Pseudo-Jonathan does something striking. Where the Hebrew Bible says bnê hāʾĕlōhîm ("sons of God") without naming any of them, the Targum names two:

"Shemhazai and Azael, they fell from heaven, and were on earth in those days." — Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Gen 6:4 (Aramaic)

Those are the Watchers from 1 Enoch.

Why this is remarkable

By the time Targum Pseudo-Jonathan reached its final form (probably 7th–8th century CE, though parts are much older), mainstream Rabbinic Judaism had set 1 Enoch aside. It wasn't in the canon. It wasn't taught. The dominant interpretive line on Gen 6:1–4 was that "sons of God" meant human nobles or judges — anything but rebellious angels.

And yet here, in a text that was actually read aloud in synagogues, the names from 1 Enoch's Watchers narrative survive intact. Whoever assembled Targum Pseudo-Jonathan didn't think they could simply translate Gen 6:4 without bringing in the older tradition that explained it.

How they got there

Two routes are likely, and both probably contributed:

  1. The Midrash Abkir, a (now mostly lost) midrashic collection that preserved a long folktale about Shemhazai and Azael — including the story of Shemhazai's repentance and his suspension in the sky as the constellation Orion.
  2. Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, a 9th-century midrashic compilation, has the same story in chapters 22 and 27.

The Targum didn't invent the names. It inherited them from a stream of Jewish narrative tradition that never quite stopped telling the Watchers story, even after the official canon-makers had moved on.

What the rest of the Targum says about Gen 6

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan's full expansion of Gen 6:1–4 reads like a digest of 1 Enoch 6–11:

  • It identifies "sons of God" as fallen angels
  • It names Shemhazai and Azael explicitly
  • It describes their corrupting influence on humanity
  • It links the giants to their offspring

This is mainstream Jewish liturgical reading material that contains, in compressed form, the entire Watchers narrative — centuries after 1 Enoch had supposedly been forgotten in Judaism. The tradition survived underground.

Cross-references

Further reading

  • M. Maher, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Genesis (The Aramaic Bible, Liturgical Press, 1992) — English translation with notes.
  • A. Y. Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 6 — on the survival of the Watcher tradition in rabbinic-era Jewish literature.
  • J. R. Davila, The Hekhalot Literature in Translation (Brill, 2013) — for the broader stream of mystical Jewish texts that preserved Enochic motifs.
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