How Pseudo-Jonathan Frames the Pre-Flood Verdict

The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis rewrites the two short pre-flood verses that open the Noah cycle, Genesis 6:7 and Genesis 6:11, with a heavy editorial hand. The first passage turns the divine resolve to wipe out humanity into an action of the Memra, the divine Word. The second passage moves the corruption off the land itself and pins it on the inhabitants, who have swerved from righteousness. Read together, the two glosses give a compressed Aramaic theology of the flood verdict that is sharper, more legal, and more morally specific than the Hebrew it translates.

The Memra as the Speaker of the Sentence

The Hebrew of Genesis 6:7 has the Lord saying He will blot out the human race He created. Pseudo-Jonathan reroutes both halves of that sentence through the Memra. The Aramaic reads that the Lord will abolish humanity by His Word, and that He has repented in His Word for having made them. The Memra is not a second deity and not a personification. It is a technical term for the way God acts within creation without being collapsed into it. By inserting the Memra twice in one verse, the translator signals that the flood is not a sudden emotional reversal. It is a decree, spoken, and the speaking is itself the agent.

This matters for how the rest of the Noah narrative will read in Aramaic. When the waters arrive and when the bow appears in the clouds, the Memra will continue to be the actor. The decree that ends the old world is the same Word that will later swear off such a decree forever.

Repentance Reframed Through the Word

The Hebrew verb in Genesis 6:7 is one of the harder words in the Torah for a translator. It can mean to be grieved, to relent, or to change one's mind. A literal rendering risks suggesting that God simply changed His mind, which sits uneasily with later biblical claims that the Eternal does not repent. Pseudo-Jonathan handles the difficulty by routing the repentance through the Memra. The grief and the reversal are real, but they are spoken, placed inside divine speech rather than inside divine feeling.

The move is consistent with how the targum treats other moments of divine anthropopathism. It keeps the moral weight of the verse while screening the Eternal from emotional turbulence that would make Him resemble a mortal sovereign. The grief is voiced through the Word, and the Word can carry it.

Corruption as a Human Act, Not a Cosmic Stain

Genesis 6:11 in the Hebrew is famously terse. The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. Read straight, it sounds as if the land itself had gone bad. Pseudo-Jonathan refuses that reading. The Aramaic specifies that the earth was corrupted through its inhabitants, who had declined from the ways of righteousness before the Lord. The corruption is not in the soil. It is a verdict on conduct.

The translator then names the second clause more precisely. Where the Hebrew has chamas, often rendered violence, the Aramaic says the earth was filled with rapine, the taking of what is not one's own. The Sages elsewhere identify this as the decisive sin of the flood generation. Pseudo-Jonathan brings that diagnosis into the verse itself, so the Aramaic reader meets it at the moment the verdict is sealed.

Preservation and the Force of an Aramaic Verdict

The two glosses are preserved as part of a targum that circulated for centuries under the name of Jonathan ben Uzziel but was almost certainly the work of later Palestinian translators. Manuscripts of Pseudo-Jonathan are scarcer than those of Onkelos, and the text was long known mainly through the editio princeps printed in Venice in 1591 and through a single complete manuscript now held in the British Library. That sixteenth-century codex is the witness on which most modern critical editions rest, including the work of E.G. Clarke and the Aramaic Bible series.

The preservation question matters because Pseudo-Jonathan is the targum that carries the most aggadic expansion. Its readings often supply midrashic material found nowhere else in surviving rabbinic literature. Without the surviving manuscripts, the Aramaic reframing of the flood verdict would have been lost. Each copy is a vote that this expansive form of translation was worth keeping alongside the more restrained Onkelos.

Why the Two Verses Read as a Pair

Pseudo-Jonathan groups the two glosses so they argue one case. Genesis 6:7 establishes that the agent of the verdict is the Memra, the divine Word, and that even divine regret is processed through that Word. Genesis 6:11 establishes that the cause of the verdict is human, specifically the abandonment of righteousness and the spread of plunder. The first verse protects the dignity of the Eternal. The second verse refuses to let humanity off the hook by blaming the land.

Together they answer the question the Hebrew leaves open about why the flood happened. It happened because the Memra decreed it, and because the inhabitants of the earth had walked away from righteousness. A decree without a cause would be arbitrary. A cause without a decree would be a complaint without consequence. Pseudo-Jonathan binds the two so the Noah generation faces a verdict that is both spoken and earned.

The Aramaic Pre-Flood World in Miniature

These two short glosses are a miniature of how Pseudo-Jonathan works on the Torah as a whole. It translates, but it also teaches. It refuses to leave the Eternal exposed to charges of caprice and refuses to let human readers shrug off the moral weight of their own conduct. By the time the Aramaic reader reaches Genesis 6:12 and the command to build the ark, the verdict has already been framed as a deliberate, spoken response to a generation that filled the earth with rapine.