If one reflects that the Bible is at the same time the most important and the most obscure of the books that 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 reproduces 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 integrity 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 variants, if there were any, were due to blunders of the copyists. Rashi, who probably carefully compared manuscripts, once remarked upon such faulty readings. It is to the Massoretes that some attribute the accents which serve to mark at once the punctuation and the accentuation of the Biblical text. Rashi naturally conformed to this system of accentuation, and if he departed from it, it seems he frequently did so inadvertently. * * * * * But the two great sources upon which Rashi drew for his exegesis were the Talmudic and the Midrashic literature, with their two methods of interpreting the Scriptures. As a knowledge of these two methods is indispensable to an understanding of Rashi's exegesis, I will give some pages from the work of a recent French exegete, L. Wogue, who presents an excellent characterization of them in his <I>Histoire de la Bible et de l'exegese biblique:</I>