In lieu of a New Year resolution, I'll just continue my thoughts on Jewish Aramaic. I just remembered it precedes the Targum. In fact the Dead Sea Scrolls include a couple of translations: one of the Yom Kippur ritual from Leviticus (perhaps done as a florilegium rather than actual Torah); and one of Job. We lack sufficient evidence to decide if the former competed with the Targum genre. The latter on the other hand...
Gavin Mcdowell (pdf) offers some insights, garnered from David Shepherd 2002 among others. He points out that the Targum genre was midrashic. It took the text, which (usually) it didn't override, instead adding content to explain the meaning. As a translation, compare Theodotion even Aquila in Greek. As to the expository content, the Targum acts more like... the Septuagint, or the Samaritan expansions, excepting that the additions were all Aramaic and not dragged in from other spots of the Hebrew Tanakh. Muqatil bin Sulayman seems to have had a similar attitude in his tafsir of Quran. And then there's that old Latin Quran...
Qumran's Job, by contrast, is a paraphrase. The attempt is to get across the meaning of the book without transmitting word-for-word Hebrew. At least here, the translator figured he could do good-enough. Here wasn't a legal principle, nor the word of G-d as might be delivered to (say) Isaiah; just the book's philosophy. This is like how that book got translated into Syriac (independently).
I understand that the Greek of Job is pretty-much a different book entirely, forcing Job to be a good deal more patient than he was in Hebrew or Aramaic.
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