How Jacob Watched Past Gideon and Samson Toward the Tower of Eder

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis takes two of Jacob's quietest verses and turns them into one coordinated prophecy. The first comes in Genesis 35:21, where the patriarch pitches his tent beyond a place called Migdal Eder, the tower of the flock. The second comes in Genesis 49:18, buried inside the long death-bed blessing, where Jacob suddenly breaks off and cries, For Your salvation I have waited, O Lord. In the plain Hebrew text these moments sit far apart and read as a wayside camp and a sudden sigh. The targumist reads them as two sides of one statement about how the future will arrive.

Two Verses That Pseudo-Jonathan Stitches Together

The first passage is short enough to quote in full. Jacob spreads his tent beyond the tower of Eder, the place from whence, it is to be, the King Meshiha will be revealed at the end of the days. The biblical verse offers only the geography. Pseudo-Jonathan plants a future inside the geography. The same ground where Jacob rests his flocks will, in a far horizon, be the spot from which the messiah steps into history.

The second passage reaches in the opposite direction. Inside the long sequence of tribal blessings, Jacob pauses after speaking of Dan. The plain text gives only the one-line cry about waiting for salvation. Pseudo-Jonathan fills in the vision behind it. Jacob is shown Gideon bar Joash and Shimshon bar Manovach, who were established to be deliverers, and he answers that he expects neither one. Their rescue, he says, will be the salvation of an hour. He waits, instead, for the salvation of eternity.

Read together, the two expansions form a closed circle. At Migdal Eder, Jacob marks where the final redeemer will appear. On his death-bed, he refuses to settle for any redeemer who is not that one.

Why Gideon and Samson Get Named and Set Aside

The choice of Gideon and Samson is not accidental. Both are judges with miraculous careers and clear divine commissions. Gideon routs Midian with three hundred men and a few torches. Samson tears apart a lion and topples a Philistine temple at the cost of his own life. Either one, viewed from inside the book of Judges, looks like a candidate for the great rescuer of Israel. The targumist makes Jacob look at both and decline.

The reason given is striking in its restraint. Jacob does not accuse the judges of failure or sin. He simply says that their salvation is the salvation of an hour. Gideon defeats Midian and the cycle of oppression returns. Samson humbles the Philistines and dies under the rubble while they continue to rule. The patriarch wants, and waits for, a deliverance that does not need to be repeated.

Putting these names in Jacob's mouth also performs a quiet pedagogical move. Later readers, encountering an impressive figure, might be tempted to call him the awaited redeemer. The targum gives them an Israelite founder who already considered the strongest candidates from the book of Judges and named them as insufficient.

Migdal Eder as a Geographic Promise

The Tower of Eder reading works in the opposite direction. Where the death-bed scene removes false candidates, the Migdal Eder gloss fixes a positive location. The verse identifies a specific stretch of land near Bethlehem, the same region later associated with David's birth and with the line from which the messiah is expected to come. Pseudo-Jonathan does not labor the Davidic point, but it sits inside the geography. The tower of the flock, near the city of the shepherd-king, becomes the place from which the King Meshiha will be revealed.

This reading turns a tent-pitching into a prophetic act. Jacob is not merely passing through. He is laying down a marker on the map of redemption, the way he sets up a pillar at Bethel after the dream of the ladder. The same patriarch who saw angels climbing a ramp between heaven and earth also sees, in the soil under his tent, the future stage on which the final redeemer will appear.

How the Tradition Preserves These Readings

The two glosses survived because the targumic tradition treated Aramaic paraphrase as a vehicle for organized memory. Pseudo-Jonathan is one of several Aramaic renderings of the Torah, alongside Onkelos and the Fragment Targums, and was copied for centuries in the margins and facing columns of Torah manuscripts. Where Onkelos tends to translate close to the Hebrew, Pseudo-Jonathan absorbs a wide range of aggadic material from the broader corpus of Pseudo-Jonathan and related midrashim.

Preservation also depended on liturgical habits. In communities that read the Aramaic targum alongside the Hebrew portion, the messianic gloss on Migdal Eder became part of how the weekly portion of Vayishlach was heard. The Jacob-and-the-judges expansion attached itself to the death-bed scene in Vayechi, a passage already saturated with future-tense blessing. Each year, the targum carried these readings forward as part of the regular cycle.

Later commentators continued the work. Rashi cites Migdal Eder traditions on Genesis 35 and brings the messianic association into his own gloss. Medieval Jewish exegetes refer back to the targum when explaining why Jacob would interrupt his death-bed blessing with a cry about salvation, since the plain text alone leaves the interruption unexplained.

What the Pair Asks of Its Readers

The combined effect of the two glosses is a kind of training in patience. Jacob, on the targum's reading, is a model of how to live inside an unfinished story. He marks the location of the final redemption and then continues to pitch his tents and bury his dead. He sees future deliverers who will accomplish real things and refuses to call any of them the end. The death-bed cry, For Your salvation I have waited, is not a complaint that nothing has happened. It is a declaration that the partial rescues which will come are not to be confused with the lasting one.