Torah with Onkelos — תורה עם אונקלוס

Study the weekly Torah reading side by side with Targum Onkelos, the classical Aramaic translation, aliyah by aliyah.

New here? Start with this

Targum Onkelos is the Aramaic translation of the Torah that Jews have read alongside the Hebrew for centuries — the Talmud asks us to review each week’s portion “twice in the Hebrew and once in the Targum” (shnayim mikra ve-echad targum). Because it is a translation, Onkelos rarely explains anything outright. His interpretation lies in his choices: a different word here, an added word there, a difficult phrase smoothed out. These pages show you where those choices are and what they suggest.

Each aliyah page sets out, for every verse:

• Torah — the Hebrew text with vowels and cantillation, with an English translation;
• Onkelos — the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos, with a close English translation that uses the same wording as the Torah translation wherever the Aramaic says the same thing, so that every difference stands out;
• What Onkelos tells us — short notes on what is translated literally, what is added or changed, and what those choices suggest about how Onkelos read the verse, with the key Aramaic words glossed.

Every page opens with an orientation and ends with a review of the aliyah and an Aramaic word list. You don’t need to know Aramaic: every Aramaic word discussed is transliterated and translated. If you are doing shnayim mikra, the Shnayim Mikra pages give the plain text for reading; these pages are for understanding it.

Published parashiyot

• Parashat Bereshit בראשיתFirstSecondThirdFourthFifthSixthSeventh

Sources. Torah: Miqra according to the Masorah (CC-BY-SA). Onkelos: the commonly printed text, Torat Emet edition (Public Domain), compared with the Yemenite Taj text (CC-BY-SA). English of the Torah: Metsudah Chumash, Metsudah Publications, 2009 (CC-BY). All via Sefaria . The translation of Onkelos and the notes are new. The notes compare the Aramaic with the Hebrew only; any suggestion about why Onkelos translated as he did is an inference from the text. Divine Names are printed as ה׳ and אלקים.